
The Singularities
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Nicholas Guy Smith
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By:
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John Banville
About this listen
From the revered Booker Prize-winning author comes a playful, multilayered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory, which opens with the return of one of his most celebrated characters as he is released from prison.
“A triumphant piece of writing…Prose of such luscious elegance…Exhilarating.”—The New York Times Book Review
A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car—also borrowed—onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request.
With sparkling intelligence and rapier wit, John Banville revisits some of his career’s most memorable figures, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived. The Singularities occupies a singular space and will surely be one of his most admired works.
©2022 John Banville (P)2022 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Reading John Banville is like being in the presence of a fathomlessly talented, witty, and intelligent magician—someone so captivatingly masterful at their craft, you suspect that they could make you disappear. The Singularities proves that [Banville] deserves a summons from Stockholm . . . Time and again Banville stuns with sentences so dazzling they’re like a lightning-quick boxer’s jab.”—Randy Rosenthal, Boston Globe
“A triumphant piece of writing . . . John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance that it’s all too easy to view his work as an aesthetic project . . . Like much of his best work, [The Singularities] aims to both scrutinize and confront one of the central challenges of the human endeavor: how to create an accurate portrait of things . . . Exhilarating.”—Leo Robson, New York Times Book Review
“A bold, mind-bending novel . . . The Singularities is Banville at his most inventive . . . His verbal dexterity and poetic flourishes keep us absorbed throughout.”—Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune
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No, not this
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John Banville - the best
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I'm mystified by this sly book
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A brilliant portrayal of a bleak and forbidding world
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Impossible
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