Editions

Ancient Light

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • ISBN: 9780241986455

  • Length: 256  Pages

  • Dimensions: 181mm x 16mm x 111mm

  • Weight: 142g

  • RRP: £8.99

Ancient Light

'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.

'Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death' Financial Times

'Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence. A luminous, breathtaking work' Independent on Sunday

'Startlingly brilliant. Terrific - full of sadness and yearning' Sunday Telegraph

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • ISBN: 9780241986455

  • Length: 256  Pages

  • Dimensions: 181mm x 16mm x 111mm

  • Weight: 142g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

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

    The Sunday Times

  • 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.

    Sunday Express

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

    Metro

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

    Sunday Telegraph

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

    Independent

  • ... ravishingly written and scrupulously observed

    Irish Times

  • 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.

    Sunday Independent

  • 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.

    Irish Independent

  • 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.

    Observer

  • 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.

    Guardian

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About the Author

John Banville

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.

John Banville

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