Download or read book The Supreme Fictions of John Banville written by Joseph McMinn and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers a critical commentary on the range of John Banville's fiction, including the plays, and views that fiction in the contexts of contemporary critical theory, particularly those of postmodernism and feminism. It argues that Banville's work is deeply influenced by romantic and modernist mythologies of the creative imagination, especially those expressed by Coleridge and Wallace Stevens. Banville's interest in systems of knowledge and forms of representation is a major issue in the study, and McMinn investigates his use of paintings as metaphors.

Download or read book Snow written by John Banville and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *NATIONAL BESTSELLER* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA HISTORICAL DAGGER AWARD* A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year A New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick “Banville sets up and then deftly demolishes the Agatha Christie format…superbly rich and sophisticated.”—New York Times Book Review The incomparable Booker Prize winner’s next great crime novel—the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family. The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford—flinty, visibly Protestant and determined to identify the murderer—faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate. As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community’s secrets, like the snowfall itself, threaten to obliterate everything. Beautifully crafted, darkly evocative and pulsing with suspense, Snow is “the Irish master” (New Yorker) John Banville at his page-turning best. Don't miss John Banville's next novel, The Lock-up! Other riveting mysteries from John Banville: April in Spain

Download or read book The Book of Evidence written by John Banville and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Banville’s stunning powers of mimicry are brilliantly on display in this engrossing novel, the darkly compelling confession of an improbable murderer. Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband and father living the life of a dissolute exile on a Mediterranean island. When a debt comes due and his wife and child are held as collateral, he returns to Ireland to secure funds. That pursuit leads to murder. And here is his attempt to present evidence, not of his innocence, but of his life, of the events that lead to the murder he committed because he could. Like a hero out of Nabokov or Camus, Montgomery is a chillingly articulate, self-aware, and amoral being, whose humanity is painfully on display.

Download or read book Ancient Light written by John Banville and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: “a devastating account of a boy’s sexual awakening and the loss of his childhood…. Seamless [and] profound ... An unsettling and beautiful work.” —Wall Street Journal Is there a difference between memory and invention? That is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave as he reflects on his first, and perhaps only, love—an underage affair with his best friend’s mother. When his stunted acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role playing a man who may not be who he claims, his young leading lady—famous and fragile—unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see, with startling clarity, the gap between the things he has done and the way he recalls them. Profoundly moving, Ancient Light is written with the depth of character, clarifying lyricism, and heart-wrenching humor that mark all of Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville’s extraordinary works.

Download or read book April in Spain written by John Banville and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *NATIONAL BESTSELLER* Booker Prize winner John Banville returns with a dark and evocative new mystery set on the Spanish coast Don't disturb the dead… On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cafés and the company of his disarmingly lovely wife. When he glimpses a familiar face in the twilight at Las Acadas bar, it's hard at first to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him. Because this young woman can't be April Latimer. She was murdered by her brother, years ago—the conclusion to an unspeakable scandal that shook one of Ireland's foremost political dynasties. Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home to Ireland and soon Detective St. John Strafford is dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one en route. A relentless hit man is on the hunt for his latest prey, and the next victim might be Quirke himself. Sumptous, propulsive and utterly transporting, April in Spain is the work of a master writer at the top of his game. Don't miss John Banville's next novel, The Lock-up! Other riveting mysteries from John Banville: Snow

Download or read book The Sea written by John Banville and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife. In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel—among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

Download or read book The Blue Guitar written by John Banville and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Banville, the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, now gives us a new novel—at once trenchant, witty, and shattering—about the intricacies of artistic creation, about theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves. Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme (“O O O. An absurdity. You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop”), is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who has never before been caught and steals only for pleasure. Both art and the art of thievery have been part of his “endless effort at possession,” but now he’s pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well. Having recognized the “man-killing crevasse” that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it, he has stopped painting. And his last act of thievery—the last time he felt its “secret shiver of bliss”—has been discovered. The fact that the purloined possession was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend has compelled him to run away—from his mistress, his home, his wife; from whatever remains of his impulse to paint; and from a tragedy that has long haunted him—and to sequester himself in the house where he was born. Trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have, excavating memories of family, of places he has called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him (“one of my eyes is forever turning towards the world beyond”), Olly reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself.

Download or read book Mrs Osmond written by John Banville and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea continues the story of Isabel Archer, the young protagonist of Henry James’s beloved The Portrait of a Lady—in this masterful novel of betrayal, corruption, and moral ambiguity. Eager but naïve, in James’s novel Isabel comes into a large, unforeseen inheritance and marries the charming, penniless, and—as Isabel finds out too late—cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond. Here Banville imagines Isabel’s second chapter telling the story of a woman reawakened by grief and the knowledge that she has been grievously wronged, and determined to resume her quest for freedom and independence.

Download or read book The Silver Swan written by Benjamin Black and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inimitable Quirke returns in another spellbinding crime novel, in which a young woman's dubious suicide sets off a new string of hazards and deceptions Two years have passed since the events of the bestselling Christine Falls, and much has changed for Quirke, the irascible, formerly hard-drinking Dublin pathologist. His beloved Sarah is dead, his surrogate father lies in a convent hospital paralyzed by a devastating stroke, and Phoebe, Quirke's long-denied daughter, has grown increasingly withdrawn and isolated. With much to regret from his last inquisitive foray, Quirke ought to know better than to let his curiosity get the best of him. Yet when an almost forgotten acquaintance comes to him about his beautiful young wife's apparent suicide, Quirke's "old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what was hidden" is roused again. As he begins to probe further into the shadowy circumstances of Deirdre Hunt's death, he discovers many things that might better have remained hidden, as well as grave danger to those he loves. Haunting, masterfully written, and utterly mesmerizing in its nuance, The Silver Swan fully lives up to the promise of Christine Falls and firmly establishes Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville) among the greatest of crime writers.

Download or read book Christine Falls written by Benjamin Black and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2007-03-06 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the debut crime novel from the Booker-winning author, a Dublin pathologist follows the corpse of a mysterious woman into the heart of a conspiracy among the city's high Catholic society It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death. It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. And as Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the true facts behind her death, he comes up against some insidious—and very well-guarded—secrets of Dublin's high Catholic society, among them members of his own family. Set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of Booker Prize winner John Banville's fiction to a thrilling, atmospheric crime story. Quirke is a fascinating and subtly drawn hero, Christine Falls is a classic tale of suspense, and Benjamin Black's debut marks him as a true master of the form.

Download or read book The Infinities written by John Banville and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a novel that is at once a gloriously earthy romp and a wise look at the terrible, wonderful plight of being human. “One of the great living masters of English-language prose. The Infinities is a dazzling example of that mastery.” —Los Angeles Times On a languid midsummer’s day in the countryside, the Godley family gathers at the bedside of Adam, a renowned mathematician and their patriarch. But they are not alone in their vigil. Around them hovers a clan of mischievous immortals—Zeus, Pan, and Hermes among them—who begin to stir up trouble for the Godleys, to sometimes wildly unintended effect.

Download or read book The Black Eyed Blonde written by John Banville and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe returns in The Black-Eyed Blonde—also published as Marlowe as by John Banville—the basis for the major motion picture starring Liam Neeson as the iconic detective. "Somewhere Raymond Chandler is smiling . . . I loved this book. It was like having an old friend, one you assumed was dead, walk into the room." —Stephen King "It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving." The streets of Bay City, California, in the early 1950s are as mean as they get. Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and the private eye business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: blond, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover. Almost immediately, Marlowe discovers that the man's disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City's richest and most ruthless families—and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune. “It’s vintage L.A., toots: The hot summer, rain on the asphalt, the woman with the lipstick, cigarette ash and alienation, V8 coupes, tough guys, snub-nosed pistols, the ice melting in the bourbon . . . . The results are Chandleresque, sure, but you can see Banville’s sense of fun.” —The Washington Post

Download or read book The Unbearable Lightness of Being written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.

Download or read book The Secret Guests written by Benjamin Black and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When you're done binge-watching The Crown, pick up this multifaceted wartime thriller." —Kirkus Reviews As London endures nightly German bombings, Britain’s secret service whisks the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret from England, seeking safety for the young royals on an old estate in Ireland. Ahead of the German Blitz during World War II, English parents from every social class sent their children to the countryside for safety, displacing more than three million young offspring. In The Secret Guests, the British royal family takes this evacuation a step further, secretly moving the princesses to the estate of the Duke of Edenmore in “neutral” Ireland. A female English secret agent, Miss Celia Nashe, and a young Irish detective, Garda Strafford, are assigned to watch over “Ellen” and “Mary” at Clonmillis Hall. But the Irish stable hand, the housemaid, the formidable housekeeper, the Duke himself, and other Irish townspeople, some of whom lost family to English gunshots during the War of Independence, go freely about their business in and around the great house. Soon suspicions about the guests’ true identities percolate, a dangerous boredom sets in for the princesses, and, within and without Clonmillis acreage, passions as well as stakes rise. Benjamin Black, who has good information that the princesses were indeed in Ireland for a time during the Blitz, draws readers into a novel as fascinating as the nascent career of Miss Nashe, as tender as the homesickness of the sisters, as intriguing as Irish-English relations during WWII, and as suspenseful and ultimately action-packed as war itself.

Download or read book John Banville and His Precursors written by Pietra Palazzolo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together leading international scholars, John Banville and His Precursors explores Booker and Franz Kafka prize-winning Irish author John Banville's most significant intellectual influences. The book explores how Banville's novels engage deeply with a wide range of sources, from literary figures such as Samuel Beckett, Heinrich von Kleist, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Henry James, to thinkers such as Freud, Heidegger, and Blanchot. Reading the full range of Banville's writings - from his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea to his latest book, Mrs Osmond – John Banville and His Precursors reveals the richness of the author's work. In this way, the book also raises questions about the contemporary moment's relationship to a variety of intellectual and cultural traditions - Romanticism, Modernism, existentialism – and how the significance of these can be appreciated in new and often surprising ways.

Download or read book Athena written by John Banville and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-14 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita. • "A strange and dreamlike book ... Banville has a breathtaking style." —The Boston Globe

Download or read book Amongst Women written by John McGahern and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1991-09-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Moran is an old Irish Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerrilla leader in the Irish War of Independence. Moran is till fighting—with his family, his friends, and even himself—in this haunting testimony to the enduring qualities of the human spirit.