John Banville

Oliver Otway Orme, a semi-famous artist and petty thief, despairing of limits in his talents, flees when his latest theft is discovered and sequesters himself in his childhood home, where he struggles to understand how he reached his current state.

Presents a memoir of the author's life near Dublin, a city that inspired his imagination and literary life and served as a backdrop for the dissatisfactions of adult years shaped by Dublin's cultural, political, architectural, and social history. "Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, author John Banville ... saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child. It was first a birthday treat, the world his beloved, eccentric...

"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar -- a dazzling new novel that extends the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, into unexpected (and completely stand-alone) territory. Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naive girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into...

"From the revered, Booker Prize-winning author comes a playful, multi-layered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory, which opens with the return of one of his most celebrated characters-Freddie Montgomery from The Book of Evidence-as he is released from prison. A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sportscar -- also borrowed -- onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the...

The story of British Cold War spies told in the form of a memoir by Sir Victor Maskell, a respected art historian unmasked as an agent of the Soviet Union. He describes who they were and why they did it--why he did it--tracing their evolution from the original 1930s Cambridge university graduates to the present. By the author of Athena. In a novel based on the lives of the Cambridge spies, Victor Maskell, faced with exposure after a lifetime of hiding,...

On a languid midsummer's day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician lies dying. Gathered around him are his family: Adam, his son; Adam's wife; Petra, his daughter; his wife Ursula, stepmother to his children; and his daughter's young man. But the Godley family is not alone in their vigil. Around them hovers a family of mischievious immortals who begin to sir up trouble to sometimes wildly unintended effect.

In 1920, a young woman struggles with her longings for love and the yearning for freedom as the war for Irish independence escalates around her family of Anglo-Irish aristocrats and their estate in County Cork.

After just a year of marriage, the immaculate life Georgina (Julia Stiles) has quickly become intoxicated by is blown apart when her art collector husband Constantine is killed in an explosion aboard the yacht of a Russian oligarch. Believing there to be more to the tragedy, she sets out to uncover what happened. Dark truths about Constantine's dealings emerge and, as she begins to realise who she was really married to, Georgina enters a spiral of...