Böcker av John Banville

'A masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected' Professor John Sutherland, Chair of Judges, Man Booker Prize 2005The Sea is John Banville's Man Booker prize-winning exploration of memory, childhood and loss. When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Mr and Mrs Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins Myles and Chloe, who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow.

A mystery man with a borrowed name, just released from prison; the Godley family, descendants of world-famous scientist Adam Godley; a beautiful woman with an unusual request. With sparkling wit and intelligence, Booker Prize-winning John Banville revisits some of his most memorable figures, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived.

Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe returns in award-winning author John Banville's Marlowe-originally published as The Black-Eyed Blonde under the pen name Benjamin Black-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

The Sunday Times bestselling author of Snow and April in Spain is back, as Strafford and Quirke return with their most troubling case yet.

Don't disturb the dead. On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax - despite the beaches, the cafes and the company of his disarmingly lovely wife.

*NATIONAL BESTSELLER*Booker Prize winner John Banville returns with a dark and evocative new mystery set on the Spanish coastDon'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.

'The body is in the library,' Colonel Osborne said. 'Come this way.'Following the discovery of the corpse of a highly respected parish priest at Ballyglass House - the Co. Wexford family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family - Detective Inspector St John Strafford is called in from Dublin to investigate.

A unique anthology devoted to a single story-"Signs and Symbols" by Vladimir Nabokov-which exposes the way we read and interpret short stories.

The darkly compelling confession of an improbable murderer, shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize.

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.

'Sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose' Sunday TimesAthena is the third in the Frames Trilogy, a set of loosely connected novels by the Booker Prize-winning author, John Banville. Morrow - a clerkish, middle-aged type encumbered with a chain-smoking dying aunt and a considerable talent for wallowing - is at a loose end when, on two separate occasions, he is beckoned up the stairs of an empty Dublin house. The first is an offer of dubious work, and Morrow soon becomes caught up in a conspiracy to authenticate a series of fake paintings. The second, possibly even odder, is an offer of a love - of a sort. Written in typically luminous prose and featuring a rich cast of characters, Athena is a paean to art, painting, and love, in all its mercurial richness.

'Banville is superb . . . there are not many historical novels of which it can be said that they illuminate both the time that forms their subject matter and the time in which they are read: Doctor Copernicus is among the very best of them' The EconomistThe first in John Banville Revolutions Trilogy and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Doctor Copernicus is a rich historical novel that explores the life of one of history's greatest scientists. The work of Nicholas Koppernigk, better known as Copernicus, shattered the medieval view of the universe and led to the formulation of the image of the solar system we know today. Here his life is powerfully evoked in a novel that offers a vivid portrait of a man of painful reticence, haunted by a malevolent brother and baffled by the conspiracies that rage around him and his ideas while he searches for the secret of life.

Told with lyrical prose, John Banville's Birchwood is the elegiac story of the aristocratic decline of an eccentric family riddled with dark secrets.Once the big house on an Irish estate, Birchwood has turned into a baroque madhouse for its ruined inhabitants. One disaster succeeds another, until young Gabriel Godkin runs away to join a travelling circus and look for his long-lost twin sister. Soon he discovers that famine and unrest stalk the countryside, and Ireland is ruined too.

The first of John Banville's novels concerning father and daughter Alexander and Cass Cleave, Eclipse is a lyrical exploration of memory, family and identity.Alexander Cleave, actor, has left his career and his family behind and banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life, but finds this impossible in a house brimming with presences, some ghostly, some undeniably human. Memories, anxiety for the future and more particularly for his beloved but troubled daughter, conspire to distract him from his dreaming retirement. This humane and beautifully written story tells the tragic tale of a man, intelligent, preposterous and vulnerable, who in attempting to bring the performance to a close finds himself travelling inevitably towards a devastating denouement.

'Superbly illuminates the man, the time, and the everlasting quest for knowledge' Observer Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in south Germany, was one of the world's greatest mathematicians and astronomers. The novel Kepler, by John Banville, brilliantly recreates his life and his incredible drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe while being driven from exile to exile by religious and domestic strife. At the same time it illuminates the harsh realities of the Renaissance world; rich in imaginative daring but rooted in poverty, squalor and the tyrannical power of emperors.

'Shroud will not be easily surpassed for its combination of wit, moral complexity and compassion. It is hard to see what more a novel could do' Irish TimesDark secrets and reality unravel in Shroud, the second of John Banville's three novels to feature Cass Cleave, alongside Eclipse and Ancient Light. Axel Vander, distinguished intellectual and elderly academic, is not the man he seems. When a letter arrives out of the blue, threatening to unveil his secrets - and carefully concealed identity - Vander travels to Turin to meet its author. There, muddled by age and alcohol, unable always to distinguish fact from fiction, Vander comes face to face with the woman who has the knowledge to unmask him, Cass Cleave. However, her sense of reality is as unreliable as his, and the two are quickly drawn together, their relationship dark, disturbed and doomed to disaster from its very start.

From John Banville, one of the world's greatest writers, comes The Blue Guitar, a story of theft and the betrayal of friendship.Adultery is always put in terms of thieving. But we were happy together, simply happy.Oliver Orme used to be a painter, well known and well rewarded, but the muse has deserted him. He is also, as he confesses, a petty thief; he does not steal for gain, but for the thrill of it. HIs worst theft is Polly, the wife of his friend Marcus, with whom he has had an affair. When the affair is discovered, Oliver hides himself away in his childhood home. From here he tells the story of a year, from one autumn to the next. Many surprises and shocks await him, and by the end of his story, he will be forced to face himself and seek a road towards redemption.Shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2016Praise for Ancient Light:'Everything I want from a love story: sexy, convincing, baffling, funny, sad and unforgettable' Evening Standard, Books of the Year'Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death' Financial Times

'A beautiful, beguiling book full of resonances that continue to sound long after you've turned the final page. Its imagining is magical, its execution dazzlingly skilful.' Sunday Tribune Ghosts opens with a shipwreck, leaving a party of sightseers temporarily marooned on an island. The stranded castaways make their way towards the big isolated house which is home to the reclusive Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic assistant, Licht, but it is also home to another, unnamed presence . . . Onto this seemingly haunted island, where a strange singing hangs in the air, John Banville drops an intriguing cast of characters - including a murderer - and weaves a tale where the details are clear but the conclusion polymorphous - shifting appearances, transformations and thwarted assumptions make this world of uneasy calm utterly enthralling.

'The Untouchable is an engrossing, exquisitely written and almost bewilderingly smart book . . . It's the fullest book I've read in a very long time, utterly accomplished, thoroughly readable, written by a novelist of vast talent' Richard Ford Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After the announcement in the Commons and the hasty revelation of his double life of wartime espionage, his disgrace is public, his knighthood revoked, his position as curator of the Queen's pictures terminated. There are questions to be answered. For whom has he been sacrificed? To what has he sacrificed his life?The Untouchable is beautifully crafted novel inspired by the famous Cambridge Spies by John Banville, the author of the Booker prize-winning The Sea.

John Banville's Ancient Light is a story of obsessive young love and the power of grief 'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.'In a small town in 1950s Ireland a fifteen-year-old boy has illicit meetings with a thirty-five-year-old woman - in the back of her car on sunny mornings, and in a rundown cottage in the country on rain-soaked afternoons. Unsure why she has chosen him, he becomes obsessed and tormented by this first love. Half a century later, actor Alexander Cleave - grieving for the recent loss of his daughter - recalls these trysts, trying to make sense of the boy he was and of the needs and frailties of the human heart.Praise for Ancient Light:'Brilliant. Banville excels in his brightly lit descriptions of self-absorbed teenage lust', Guardian'Dazzling . . . captures a long-lost adolescent world of passion and desire', Independent'Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence ... This is a luminous breathtaking work', Independent on SundayJohn Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fourteen previous novels including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. He was recently awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Dublin.

Takes us into the hauntingly confused worlds of two ageing male protagonists - washed-up scientist Freddie Montgomery, desperate to explain why he is being held in an Irish prison for murder and recently widowed art historian Max Morden, who has returned to a sleepy seaside boarding house to relive the events of his first adolescent awakenings.