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.
John 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.
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*
Retired actor Alexander Cleave plumbs his memory to describe his first "love," a 15-year-old's unlikely affair with his best friend's mother. Early on, Alex confides he is sure that the affair's inevitable discovery will be devastating to both, spending the greater part of the novel (with many close calls) elsewhere before revealing that discovery. All this relates somehow to the shaping-or misshaping-of Alex's psyche in relation to his daughter, Cass, featured in two prior Alexander Cleave novels, who died by suicide. Despite the sordid plot and a muddled subplot involving Alex costarring in a motion picture, the book is given a terrific reading by Robin Sachs. Verdict This will likely be of considerable interest to award-winning author Banville's (The Infinities) fans and so is recommended for adult fiction collections.-Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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