New Releases by John Banville

John Banville, nato in Irlanda nel 1945, è uno dei più grandi romanzieri contemporanei. Amatissimo dalla critica (solo per fare un esempio, nel 2014 Pietro Citati sul Corriere della Sera ha definito il suo L’intoccabile "un romanzo straordinario: certo il più bello degli ultimi quarant''anni" per "la vastità, la ricchezza, il terribile riso"), Banville nel corso della sua carriera ha vinto i premi più prestigiosi, fra cui il Booker Prize per Il Mare, il Premio Franz Kafka, il Premio Nonino, l’Irish Book Awards, l’European Literary Award, l’Irish PEN Award e il Premio Principe delle Asturie per la sua opera. Diversi critici e giornalisti lo considerano, con Philip Roth e Haruki Murakami, come uno dei possibili vincitori del prossimo Premio Nobel per la Letteratura. Banville è conosciuto per la sua prosa precisa e fredda, caratterizzata da un''inventiva Nabokoviana, e per il suo umorismo nero. Fra le sue opere, anche una serie di “romanzi gialli” di altissima qualità, ambientati nella Dublino anni ''50, che hanno come protagonista l''anatomopatologo Quirke. Dai romanzi di Quirke la BBC e RTÉ hanno tratto una serie TV nel 2014. John Glass è un giornalista di tutto rispetto: irlandese, da poco trapiantato a New York, ha un passato glorioso da corrispondente in prima linea (piazza Tienanmen, il conflitto nordirlandese, l’Intifada) e una reputazione da difendere. Ma in un momento di debolezza, vinto dalle pressioni famigliari e dalle lusinghe di un compenso da un milione di dollari, accetta di scrivere la biografia di William «Big Bill» Mulholland, magnate delle telecomunicazioni dai trascorsi non proprio immacolati ed ex agente della cia. Le ricerche per il libro vengono però presto turbate da un omicidio... Fin dove si è spinto Glass? E perché viene ricattato? Inizia così un giallo sofisticato, un’indagine che porterà il giornalista a scavare nel torbido passato della famiglia della moglie. E a scoprire che il silenzio non può essere comprato, nemmeno da una delle dinastie più influenti di New York... «Un maestro la cui prosa regala un piacere continuo e quasi fisico.» Martin Amis «Banville è un vero maestro, un artista capace di un controllo totale della sua arte.» The Times

The material collected here is a treasure trove, a fine retrospective and a comprehensive guide to the work of Ireland’s greatest living novelist, John Banville. Selections are drawn from all of his novels, up to and including 2012’s Ancient Light; each piece standing alone, short-story-like, but also resonating with those around it and representing the novel from which it comes. There are radio plays, some published in print for the first time here. There is a judicious selection of his essays and reviews. Perhaps most beguiling of all are the pieces of memoir, the early work (including Banville’s first-ever piece of published fiction, from 1966) and the chance to see facsimiles of the handwritten first draft of the opening section of The Infinities. Possessed of a Past is an extraordinary document of the writer’s life and work across nearly fifty years of practice, simultaneously offering the perfect introduction to Banville’s sublime art and manna to devoted readers.

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

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the Booker Prize winner of The Sea comes “an astonishing, disturbing little novel that might have been coughed up from hell" (The New York Times Book Review) about the dark confession of an improbable murderer. “Ireland’s finest contemporary novelist.” —The Economist 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.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a brilliantly haunting novel that forges an unforgettable amalgam of enchantment and menace that suggests both The Tempest and his own acclaimed The Book of Evidence. "A surreal and exquisitely lyrical new novel by one of the great stylists writing in English today." —The Boston Globe

An actor in the twilight of his career reflects on a poignant first love affair at the age of fifteen with his best friend''s mother and inexplicably lands a role opposite a famous but fragile actress who helps him come to an astonishing realization.

John Banville, tras el pseudónimo de Benjamin Black, nos ofrece una nueva novela negra de trama y ambiente apasionantes, protagonizada por su genial y oscuro patólogo Quirke. Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras 2014 a John Banville por «su inteligente, honda y original creación novelesca» y a su «otro yo, Benjamin Black, autor de turbadoras y críticas novelas policíacas.» Ha pasado el tiempo para Quirke, el hastiado forense que conocimos en El secreto de Christine. La muerte de su gran amor y el distanciamiento de su hija han conseguido acentuar su carácter solitario, pero su capacidad para meterse en problemas continúa intacta. Cuando Billy Hunt, conocido de sus tiempos de estudiante, le aborda para hablarle del aparente suicidio de su esposa, Quirke se da cuenta de que se avecinan complicaciones, pero, como siempre, las complicaciones son algo a lo que no podrá resistirse. De este modo se verá envuelto en un caso sórdido en el que se mezclan las drogas, la pornografía y el chantaje, y que una vez más pondrá en peligro su vida. Esta novela de ambiente y trama apasionantes confirma a Benjamin Black como uno de los escritores contemporáneos de mejor estilo y mayor capacidad de persuasión en el género de la novela negra. La crítica ha dicho... «El escritor de lengua inglesa más inteligente, el estilista más elegante.» George Steiner «Un trabajo considerable de ficción en que cada momento amable detona calmadamente mostrando una chispa criminal.» Don Delillo «Una novela absorbente y emotiva, con todos los personajes soberbiamente retratados y una prosa simplemente deslumbrante. Queremos más.» The Guardian «Hágase un favor. Acuda a una librería y compre la nueva novela de misterio de Benjamin Black, El otro nombre de Laura. Váyase directamente a casa. Si comparte vivienda, eche a sus compañeros. Sírvase una copa y acomódese en su sillón favorito para disfrutar de una auténtica dosis de sabiduría y angustia irlandesas y de prosa excelente.» Los Angeles Times «Lo que hace tan buenas las dos novelas de Black, El secreto de Christine y El otro nombre de Laura, es su prosa descriptiva, el fuerte de John Banville.» The New York Times

El Lémur está destinado a convertirse en un clásico, con todos los ingredientes del género policíaco: chantaje, adulterio, asesinato y traición. Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras 2014 a John Banville por «su inteligente, honda y original creación novelesca» y a su «otro yo, Benjamin Black, autor de turbadoras y críticas novelas policíacas.» John Glass ha abandonado su carrera como periodista para escribir una biografía autorizada de su suegro, el magnate de la comunicación y antiguo agente de la CIA, Gran Bill Mulholland. Trabaja en un gran despacho en Manhattan y vuelve a casa (la mayoría de las noches) a los brazos de su rica y bella mujer... Cuando decide contratar los servicios de un joven e insolente investigador, de asombroso parecido con un lémur, los turbios secretos de su familia política y, quizás, los suyos propios, amenazan con salir a la luz. Toda la cómoda existencia de Glass se tambalea, y acaba de derrumbarse con la muerte del Lémur: ¿quién lo mató?, ¿por qué?, ¿qué sabe?, ¿qué peligros acechan? La crítica ha dicho... «El escritor de lengua inglesa más inteligente, el estilista más elegante.» George Steiner «Una narrativa peligrosa, clara y fluida.» Don Delillo «John Banville (Benjamin Black) es un maestro y su prosa, un deleite incesante.» Martin Amis «Un brillante thriller contemporáneo que muestra a Benjamin Black (John Banville) e su mejor momento.» Foyles Library «La ficción contemporánea no tiene nada mejor... Los libros de John Banville rebosan vida y humor.» The New York Times Books Review «Publicada inicialmente por capítulos en The New York Times Magazine, esta novela negra exhibe el cáustico ingenio, marca del autor, sus compactas tramas y unos personajes viciados y atractivos.» Publishers Weekly «Banville es ese extraño escritor capaz de atrapar los cinco sentido en una oración enunciativa.» The Wall Street Journal

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.

A new thriller from the Booker Prize–winning and Edgar-nominated author of Christine Falls and The Silver Swan John Glass''s life in New York should be plenty comfortable. He''s given up his career as a journalist to write an authorized biography of his father-in-law, communications magnate and former CIA agent Big Bill Mulholland. He works in a big office in Mulholland Tower, rent-free, and goes home (most nights) to his wealthy and well-preserved wife, Wild Bill''s daughter. He misses his old life sometimes, but all in all things have turned out well. But when his shifty young researcher--a man he calls "The Lemur"--turns up some unflattering information about the family, Glass''s whole easy existence is threatened. Then the young man is murdered, and it''s up to Glass to find out what The Lemur knew, and who killed him, before any secrets come out--and before any other bodies appear.Shifting from 1950s Dublin to contemporary New York, the masterful crime writer Benjamin Black returns in this standalone thriller--a story of family secrets so deep, and so dangerous, that anyone might kill to keep them hidden.

In this deeply moving and original book, John Banville alloys mystery, fable, and ghost story with poignant psychological acuity to forge the riveting story of a man wary of the future, plagued by the past, and so uncertain in the present that he cannot discern the spectral from the real. When renowned actor Alexander Cleave was a boy living in a large house with his widowed mother and various itinerant lodgers, he encountered a strikingly vivid ghost of his father. Now that he’s fifty and has returned to his boyhood home to recover from a nervous breakdown on stage, he is not surprised to find the place still haunted. He is surprised, however, at the presence of two new lodgers who have covertly settled into his old roost. And he is soon overwhelmed by how they, coupled with an onslaught of disturbing memories, compel him to confront the clutter that has become his life: ruined career, tenuous marriage, and troubled relationship with an estranged daughter destined for doom.

A classic novel of family, isolation, and a blighted Ireland from the Man Booker-prize winning author of The Sea—about the end of innocence for a boy and his country. I am therefore I think. So starts John Banville’s 1973 novel Birchwood, a novel that centers around Gabriel Godkin and his return to his dilapidated family estate. After years away, Gabriel returns to a house filled with memories and despair. Delving deep into family secrets—a cold father, a tortured mother, an insane grandmother—Gabriel also recalls his first encounters with love and loss. Birchwood is a remarkable and complex story, told in the brilliantly styled prose of one of our most essential writers.

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.

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.

Offers a panoramic study of the city of Prague, describing its rich and varied history from the medieval period to the present day, the colorful people who shaped it, and its new place amid the changing world of post-Cold War Europe.

THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE: Freddie Montgomery has committed two crimes. He stole a small Dutch master from a wealthy family friend, and he murdered a chambermaid who caught him in the act. This is a remarkable crime novel, unlike any other in its flawlessly flowing prose, its irony, its aching sense of loss. GHOSTS: An unnamed murderer has served his time in prison and now lives on a sparsely populated island with the enigmatic Professor Kreutznaer and his eery companion, Licht. Their uneasy calm is disturbed one day with the arrival of a party of castaways. A beautiful and beguiling novel full of resonances that continue to sound long after you have turned the final page, this is also one of Banville''s funniest books. ATHENA: Morrow is at a loose end when, separately, two people beckon him up the stairs of an empty Dublin house. One offers work of a dubious kind; the other offers a sort of love. Banville''s sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose will leave the reader longing for more from this consummately skilled novelist. ''Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift for seeing people''s souls'' Don De Lillo (on "The Book of Evidence")

Irish novelist''s second play to draw upon the works of the German playwright.

''A nearly perfectly fashioned work of art'' - Irish Times The third in his thematically-connected Revolutions Trilogy, The Newton Letter is an exceptional work of literature from John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea. A historian, on the brink of completing a book on Isaac Newton, rents a cottage in southern Ireland for the summer. As the summer wears on and he dissects Newton''s mental collapse of 1693 he becomes distracted by the mysterious occupants of Fern House and finds himself constructing their imagined histories to powerful effect. His elaborate attempts to decipher the complex web of relationships are, however, far from accurate . . .

WINNER OF THE LANNAN LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION • From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes the fascinating story of a former British spy who''s been unmasked as a Russian agent—and "one of spy fiction''s greatest characters" (People). • "Contemporary fiction gets no better than this." —The New York Times Book Review One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation? As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold doubleness: Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and lover of men; betrayer and dupe. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskell''s co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity, The Untouchable places John Banville in the select company of both Conrad and le Carre. "Victor Maskell is one of the great characters in recent fiction.... The Untouchable is the best work of art in any medium on [its] subject." —Washington Post Book World "As remarkable a literary voice as any to come out of Ireland; Joyce and Beckett notwithstanding." —San Francisco Chronicle

This is novelist Banville''s first venture for the stage, a free translation of a work by Heinrich von Kleist. The setting is changed from Germany to the famine-stricken Ballybog of 1846 western Ireland in this cleverly calculated comedy about a corrupt magistrate who is forced to preside over a trial for a crime he himself has committed.

''They took everything from me. Everything.'' So says the central character of Nightspawn, John Banville''s elusive, first novel, in which the author rehearses now familiar attributes: his humour, ironies, and brilliant knowing. In the arid setting of the Aegean, Ben White indulges in an obsessive quest to assemble his ''story'' and to untangle his relationships with a cast of improbable figures. Banville''s subversive, Beckettian fiction embraces themes of freedom and betrayal, and toys with an implausible plot, the stuff of an ordinary ''thriller'' shadowed by political intrigue. In this elaborate artifact, Banville''s characters ''sometimes lose the meaning of things, and everything is just ... funny''. There begins their search for ''the magic to combat any force''.-

* Vinnare av Guinness Peat Aviation Award 1989 * »Farligt fulländad prosa.« | Don DeLillo »Mästerlig roman, vars poetiska kvaliteter, aristokratiska ironi och sinne för stor smärta påminner om Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita.« | Washington Post Freddie Montgomery är en före detta universitetslärare i statistik. Nu sitter han häktad i ett smutsigt fängelse i Dublin, misstänkt för mord. Fängelset har han börjat kalla för »hemma« och nu är han redo att berätta sin historia. Så följer den hisnande dokumentationen om en människa som undan för undan släpper spärrarna för en förtvivlan utan mått eller mål. Om hur han och hans fru Daphne, som länge levt över sina tillgångar, funnit på dumdristiga sätt att hantera sitt växande pengabehov. I en spiral av händelser hamnar Freddie i situationen där han kliver över gränsen till det värsta brottets avgrund. Läsarens problem blir till sist detsamma som domarens: Talar Freddie ens ett uns sanning? John Banvilles roman Motivet [The Book of Evidence, 1989] har jämförts med Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Camus och Fjodor Dostojevskij och räknas i dag till en av de stora brittiska romanklassikerna. I översättning av Eva Sjöstrand och med ett nyskrivet efterord av litteraturvetaren och John Banville-forskaren Joakim Wrethed. JOHN BANVILLE [f. 1945] är en irländsk författare, dramatiker och journalist. Belönad med priser såsom Booker Prize, Austrian State Prize for European Literature, Franz Kafka Prize, Prince of Asturias Award, Guinness Peat Aviation Award och Irish PEN Award. »Inte lättvindigt tar jag till jämförelser med böcker som Albert Camus Främlingen och Fjodor Dostojevskijs Brott & straff, men det är frestande efter att ha läst John Banvilles svindlande roman.« | Publishers Weekly »Som upphostad från helvetet.« | The New York Times Book Review