The Blue Guitar

Literature & Fiction

JOHN BANVILLE

Genre Fiction

Penguin Export

Ancient Light - Penguin

Literary

VIKING

Penguin

The Infinities

BOOKS ON TAPE]

The Untouchable

Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen, has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation? As Maskell attempts to come to terms with what has happened to his life, he embarks on his memoirs, retracing his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskells co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity, The Untouchable places John Banville in the select company of both Conrad and le Carr.

World Literature

Pan Books, Ltd.

Contemporary

Picador

Athena

A thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita. 'Sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose' Sunday Times 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. 'One of the most profoundly intelligent, introspective novels of recent years, questioning the perceptions of author, narrator, reader and critic' Good Book Guide 'The consummately achieved and entrancing creation of a master of language: in the fullest sense a work of art' Scotsman 'Athena is a love letter to Morrow's passions, to love, to art and to the paintings he examines: works on classical themes, in which a moment's obsession, lust, loss and magic are preserved for ever' Literary Review Volume Three of the Frames Trilogy

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband and father living the life of a dissolute exile on a Mediterranean island. When a debt becomes due and his wife and child are held as collateral, he returns to Ireland to secure funds. That pursuit leads him to commit murder. And here is his attempt to present evidence, not of his innocence, but of his life, of the events that lead to the murder he committed because he could. Like a hero out of Nabokov or Camus, Montgomery is a chillingly articulate, self-aware and amoral being, whose humanity is painfully on display.

The Book of Evidence (Frames)

Birchwood

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 Ireland is ruined as well. Famine and unrest stalk the countryside...

The work and life of Coperniccus is powerfully evoked in a novel that tells of a shy man, baffled by the conspiracies that rage around him. The second novel recreates the life of Johannes Kepler and his drive to chart the stars and planets. The Newton Letter concerns a contemporary historian writing a biography of Isaac Newton.

The Revolutions Trilogy: "Doctor Copernicus", "Kepler", "Newton Letter - An Interlude"

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Books by JOHN BANVILLE