Mrs Osmond

A MASTERFUL TALE OF BETRAYAL AND CORRUPTION BY THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE SEA 
 
'Banville is one of the writers I admire the most' Hanya Yanahigara, author of A Little Life 
 
'A brilliant feat of literary ventriloquism' The Times 
 
Having fled Rome and a stultifying marriage, Isabel Osmond is in London, brooding on the recent disclosure of her husband's shocking, years-long betrayal of her. What should she do now, and which way should she turn, in the emotional labyrinth where she has been trapped for so long? Reawakened by grief and the knowledge of having been grievously wronged, she determines to resume her youthful quest for freedom and independence. 
 
Soon Isabel must return to Italy and confront her husband, and seek to break his powerful hold on her. But will she succeed in outwitting him, and securing her revenge? 
 
Mrs Osmond is a masterly novel of betrayal, corruption and moral ambiguity, from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea. 
 
'A worthy sequel ... His book is not only an impressive recreation of James's atmospheres and pacing, but also full of minor cliff-hangers and page-turning suspenses that keep you guessing' Observer 
 
'John Banville is one of the best novelists in English, and an expert ventriloquist, among other things ... Mrs Osmond is both a remarkable novel in its own right and a superb pastiche' Guardian 
 
'John Banville is simply the finest writer at work today, a prolific prose stylist whose work has only deepened in quality throughout his career' John Boyne

A worthy sequel... His book is not only an impressive recreation of James's atmospheres and pacing, but also full of minor cliff-hangers and page-turning suspenses that keep you guessing

A brilliant feat of literary ventriloquism... Richly enjoyable and enthralling, this exercise in creative empathy is a sequel of very high finish

John Banville is one of the best novelists in English, and an expert ventriloquist, among other things . . . Mrs Osmond is both a remarkable novel in its own right and a superb pastiche

It's brilliant. It's John Banville camouflaged as Henry James - it's very, very interesting

Cillian Murphy, star of Peaky Blinders and Dunkirk

John Banville has long been the most distinctive Irish novelist of his generation

This is a superbly written novel ... Mrs Osmond represents an important contribution to Banville's impressive oeuvre

John Banville is simply the finest writer at work today, a prolific prose stylist whose work has only deepened in quality throughout his career

Banville is one of the writers I admire the most - few people can create an image as beautifully or precisely

Hanya Yanagihara, author of the Booker-shortlisted 'A Little Life'

This engrossing and often beautiful novel is a true work of art that rewards careful reading

The Booker prize winning author - widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in English today - has produced what many already consider a literary masterpiece

Banville's sequel to Henry James's "Portrait of a Lady" follows Isabel Archer back to Rome and the possible end of her marriage

An astonishing act of literary ventriloquism

Uncannily good at replicating James's style, it pays appealing tribute to his genius

John Banville channelled Henry James in the Portrait of a Lady sequel

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fifteen previous novels including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, and in 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award, Spain's most important literary prize. He lives in Dublin.

'What was freedom, she thought, other than the right to exercise one's choices?' 
 
Isabel Osmond, a spirited, intelligent young heiress, flees to London after being betrayed by her husband, to be with her beloved cousin Ralph on his deathbed. After a sombre, silent existence at her husband's Roman palazzo, Isabel's daring escape to London reawakens her youthful quest for freedom and independence, as old suitors resurface and loyal friends remind her of happier times. 
 
But soon Isabel must decide whether to return to Rome to face up to the web of deceit in which she has become entangled, or to strike out on her own once more.

The Blue Guitar

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 2016

This engrossing and often beautiful novel is a true work of art that rewards careful reading

Banville is a gorgeous writer who can nail an emotion

He shows himself, once again, as one of contemporary literature's finest and most expert witnesses... compelling and matchless prose

The book is cherishable as a meditation on life's transience, the mysteries and fleetingness of love, the waning of sexual desire, and the lost domain of childhood

An elegant novel of tangled infidelity

A brilliant study of memory, regret and inescapable alienation in relationships (...) a portrait of human frailty, it is surprisingly uplifting

Banville's prose sparkles as Orme ponders the nature of art, his life, happiness, memory and love

Banville is an expert in masculine interiority... achieving this by a luminous prose style

Banville, the Nabokov of contemporary literature, can turn even a straightforward comeuppance tale into breath-taking literary art

Banville is one of the writers I admire the most - few people can create an image as beautifully or precisely

Deliciously off-beat, gorgeous prose

This is a book to be enjoyed for the grand mastery of its description and for the way it nails the challenges we face in attempting to understand the world, others and ourselves from the limits of our own perspective

The Blue Guitar is arguably the funniest and most accessible of Banville's many novels . . . beautiful, heartbreaking

Eloquent . . . Oliver has some of the wry comic haplessness of a Beckett character

The cumulative effect of [The Blue Guitar] -the opening ludic exuberance, the subsequent steady softening, the sheer force of Banville's reflections on grief and loss-is moving, entertaining, edifying and affirmative. The Blue Guitar is a remarkable achievement: the work of a writer who knows not only about pain and eloquence, but about the consolations of learning how to think, to look and to listen

Banville's descriptive gifts are undiminished as Oliver finally stumbles towards an understanding of love

Self-depreciating and funny . . . Banville, with this narrator who is messily making it up as he goes along, who is writing a dodgy first draft in front of our eyes, seems at once to be having fun and to be utterly serious. Serious about the demolition work at the heart of this novel, a taking-down of the business of writing a novel, all those strivings, strainings, fakings and foreshortenings-and all the ridiculousness of alliteration-for-effect, with a rake of unlikely character and place names which seem right out of a sinister sort of nursery rhyme-all the artifice that the reader pretends not to see as such, all of the impulses and indulgences (stop alliterating!) with which the writer expects to get away.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fifteen previous novels including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, and in 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award, Spain's most important literary prize. He lives in Dublin.

Adultery is always put in terms of thieving. But we were happy together, simply happy. 
 
Oliver Orme is a painter who has abandoned his art. His days are now haunted by loss: loss of desire; of artistic vision; of the people he has loved. And only now does he realize that those around him understand him more than he does himself. 
 
Set in a re-imagined Ireland, The Blue Guitar reveals a life haunted by the desire to possess and always aware of the frailty of the human heart.

The Book of Evidence & The Sea

Two of John Banville’s most compelling novels are collected together in a single volume for the first time, in a beautiful hardback gift edition from Everyman.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland in 1945. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other books are Nightspawn; Birchwood; Doctor Copernicus, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976; Kepler, which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1981; The Newton Letter, which was filmed for Channel 4; Mefisto and The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize and won the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Award. John Banville is literary editor of the Irish Times and lives in London with his wife and two sons.

The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1989 and The Sea, which won the Booker prize in 2005, take 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 (The Book of Evidence) 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 (The Sea). With spellbinding virtuosity, Banville piles ambiguity upon ambiguity to construct tense tales of sex, betrayal and self-deception, which keep us turning the page, while questioning our own certainties about memory and identity. In both works, the acclaimed Irish novelist is revealed at his masterful best, conjuring dark wit, suspense and drama from the stunning lyrical beauty of his near-perfect prose.

John Banville

Glittering visual evocation, expressed in a tone at once fresh and wistfully ironic ... a world at once random, dreamlike and deeply experienced

4 STARS. Banville proves here over and over that one can write with the true texture if erotic memory without resorting to titillation. He deserves to outsell Fifty Shades of Grey tenfold.

4 STARS. Prose that lingers on every last physical and psychological detail.

Banville does regretful roues better than almost anyone ... His use of language can also be startlingly brilliant ... Terrific ... full of sadness and yearning.

This dazzling novel captures a long-lost adolescent world of passion and desire.

... ravishingly written and scrupulously observed

The Booker prize winning author - widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in English today - has produced what many already consider a literary masterpiece.

We now want them [novels] to provoke, cajole, edify, entertain, puzzle, divert, clarify and console. Banville's new novel does all these things and much more besides.

Banville, with his forensic sensory memory, his great gift for textural (and textual) precision, his ability to inhabit not just a room, as a writer, but also the full weight of a breathing body, is exactly in his element here.

A novel criss-crossed with ghost roads and dead-ends and peopled by shifty characters who seem provisional even to themselves. It is written in Baville's customary prose, rhythmic and allusive and dense with suggestive imagery, prose and deliberately slows you down and frequently wrongfoots you.

A bittersweet rumination on first love ... The language soars, full of the beauty of nature and the sadness of loss

Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence, the body yearning for sexual experience, the mind blurring eroticism and emotion ... Banville is a Nabokovian artist, his prose so rich, poetic and packed with startling imagery that reading it is akin to gliding regally through a lake of praline: it's a slow, stately process, delicious and to be savoured ... This is a luminous breathtaking work

Ancient Light also bears resemblance to Lolita that extend beyond the obvious hallmark ecstatic prose..different periods of his life blending into a single meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears.

A beautifully written tale of youthful passion

A novel about sexual awakening and the tricks that memory plays. Banville's lushly gorgeous prose enhances a mood of brooding passion in a place of secrets

A sumptuous novel. Read it for the sentences and smarts, and for the copious sexy parts

Everything I want from a love story: sexy, convincing, baffling, funny, sad and unforgettable

Banville's exquisitely written novel unravels the deceptions of memory with wit and pathos

'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' 
 
Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back of his lover's car on sunny mornings and rain-soaked afternoons. And with these early memories comes something sharper and much darker - the more recent recollection of the actor's own daughter's suicide ten years before. 
 
Ancient Light is the story of a life rendered brilliantly vivid: the obsession and selfishness of young love and the terrifying shock of grief. It is a dazzling novel, funny, utterly pleasurable and devastatingly moving in the same moment.

John Banville

Praise for Ancient Light

Glittering visual evocation, expressed in a tone at once fresh and wistfully ironic ... a world at once random, dreamlike and deeply experienced

4 STARS. Banville proves here over and over that one can write with the true texture if erotic memory without resorting to titillation. He deserves to outsell Fifty Shades of Grey tenfold.

4 STARS. Prose that lingers on every last physical and psychological detail.

Glittering visual evocation, expressed in a tone at once fresh and wistfully ironic ... a world at once random, dreamlike and deeply experienced

4 STARS. Banville proves here over and over that one can write with the true texture if erotic memory without resorting to titillation. He deserves to outsell Fifty Shades of Grey tenfold.

4 STARS. Prose that lingers on every last physical and psychological detail.

Glittering visual evocation, expressed in a tone at once fresh and wistfully ironic ... a world at once random, dreamlike and deeply experienced

4 STARS. Banville proves here over and over that one can write with the true texture if erotic memory without resorting to titillation. He deserves to outsell Fifty Shades of Grey tenfold.

4 STARS. Prose that lingers on every last physical and psychological detail.

Books by John Banville

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