New Releases by John Banville

"Alexander Clave es un viejo actor de teatro que recuerda su fugaz e intenso primer amor. Un rodaje cinematografico le llevara a intimar con una joven y popular actriz cuya vida se ha asomado al abismo y al inesperado hallazgo de respuestas acerca del destino final de las mujeres que marcaron a fuego su vida"--P. [4] of cover.

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.

An early classic from the Man Booker-prize winning author of The Sea. 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. At once a novel of a family, of isolation, and of a blighted Ireland, Birchwood is a remarkable and complex story about the end of innocence for one boy and his country, told in the brilliantly styled prose of one of our most essential writers.

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.

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.

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.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a splendidly moving, "hypnotic" exploration (The New York Times) of identity, duplicity, and desire, starring a very old, recently widowed man with secrets and the mysterious young woman destined to either destroy or save him. One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton’s Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable narrator of John Banville’s masterful new novel, is the bearer of a fearsome reputation as a literary dandy and bully. A product of the Old World, he is also an escapee from its conflagrations, with the wounds to prove it. And everything about him is a lie. Now those lies have been unraveled by a mysterious young woman whom Vander calls “Miss Nemesis.” They are to meet in Turin, a city best known for its enigmatic shroud. Is her purpose to destroy Vander or to save him—or simply to show him what lies beneath the shroud in which he has wrapped his life?

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.

''Love In The Wars'' is based on ''Penthesilea'', a tragedy by Heinrich von Kleist, and embraces the German Romantic''s variation on the conventional story of Achilles'' slaughter of the Amazon queen. Banville recounts the emotional turbulence and conflicting impulses of a heroine overcome by love.

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.

For the first time in one volume the award winning DR COPERNICUS (James Tait Black Award 1976); KEPLER (Guardian Fiction Prize 1981) & THE NEWTON LETTER (1982).

Mefisto focuses on the mathematically gifted Gabriel Swan, who seeks a numerical solution to his quest for order and meaning in life.

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''.-

A historian, trying to finish a long-overdue book on Isaac Newton, rents a cottage not far by train from Dublin for the summer. All he need, he thinks, is a few weeks of concentrated work. Why, he must unravel, did Newton break down in 1693? What possessed him to write that strange letter to his friend John Locke? But in the long seeping summer days, old sloth and present reality take over.

* 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