John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1976), the Guardian Fiction Prize (1981), the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award (1989), and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1997). He has been both shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1989) and awarded the Man Booker Prize (2005) as well as nominated for the Man Booker International Prize (2007). Other awards include the Franz Kafka Prize (2011), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2013), and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (2014). He lives in Dublin.
“Here is an astonishing, disturbing little novel that might have
been coughed up from hell.” —The New York Times Book
Review
“Ireland’s finest contemporary novelist.” —The Economist
“The Book of Evidence is a major new work of fiction in which every
suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam
within.” —Don DeLillo
"Banville has excelled himself in a flawlessly flowing prose whose
lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent
of Lolita." —Observer
"One of the most important writers now at work in English—a key
thinker, in fact, in fiction." —London Review of Books
"Remarkable ... If all crime novels were like this one, there would
no longer be the need for a genre." —Ruth Rendell
Comparisons with Camus's The Stranger and Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment are not lightly made, but spring irresistibly to mind after finishing Banville's dazzling novel, which was short-listed for Britain's Booker Award and won Ireland's very rich Guinness Peat Aviation Award, adjudicated by Graham Greene. Banville, who has written three previous books but is not widely known here, is literary editor of the Irish Times. His protagonist and first-person narrator is Frederick Montgomery, a former scientist who has taken to drifting aimlessly through life, keenly self-conscious, a brilliant observer of himself and his surroundings, but with no coherent moral center. In the course of a pathetically absurd robbery attempt--he is trying to steal a painting, with which he has become obsessed, from a neighbor of his mother--he brutally and pointlessly kills a maidservant. He tells his story as he sits in jail awaiting his trial, imagining it as a courtroom statement. But is his account--hallucinatory, spellbinding, full of the poetry and pity of life--true? In response to that question from a police inspector, the novel's last chilling line: ``All of it. None of it. Only the shame.'' Banville's style, which is spare yet richly eloquent, and his extraordinary psychological penetration, are what lift his novel to a level of comparison with the greatest writers of crime and guilt. It is difficult to imagine a reader who would not find The Book of Evidence both terrifying and moving. (Apr . )
"Here is an astonishing, disturbing little novel that might have
been coughed up from hell." -The New York Times Book
Review
"Ireland's finest contemporary novelist." -The
Economist
"The Book of Evidence is a major new work of fiction in
which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous
gleam within." -Don DeLillo
"Banville has excelled himself in a flawlessly flowing prose whose
lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent
of Lolita." -Observer
"One of the most important writers now at work in English-a key
thinker, in fact, in fiction." -London Review of Books
"Remarkable ... If all crime novels were like this one, there would
no longer be the need for a genre." -Ruth Rendell
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