John Banville

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.

"He had seen drowned people. A sight not to be forgotten." 1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn't approach but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea. Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally--the flawed but brilliant...

"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 drafty...

An art expert is hired by Irish gangsters to authenticate some 17th Century Dutch paintings. The job leads to an affair with a gangster's moll, a sado-masochistic liaison which mirrors the subject matter of the paintings. A tale of a twin obsession, art and woman.

Banville recreates the life of Johannes Kepler and his drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe. Vexed by domestic strife, appalled by religious upheaval, and vulnerable to the whims of his patrons, astronomy is a quest for some sort of divine order.

Freddie Montgomery, a thirty-eight-year-old one-time scientist, returns to his native Ireland to reclaim a seventeenth-century Dutch school painting which he believes to be part of his patrimony, committing a ghastly murder along the way.

When Quirke travels to the coast of San Sebastian, Spain for some relaxation, he sees a woman who he believes had been murdered by her brother several years prior. San Sebastian, Spain. Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cafés and the company of his lovely wife. When he glimpses a familiar face in the twilight at Las Acadas bar, he knows it can't be April Latimer-- she was murdered by her brother, years ago. When...