Showing results by author "John Banville" in All Categories

On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell—known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick—is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite. Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend.

A suspicious death, a pregnant woman suddenly gone missing: Quirke's latest case leads him inexorably toward the dark machinations of an old foe. Perhaps Quirke has been down among the dead too long. Lately the Irish pathologist has suffered hallucinations and blackouts, and he fears the cause is a brain tumor. A specialist diagnoses an old head injury caused by a savage beating; all that's needed, the doctor declares, is an extended rest.

On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cafés, and the company of his disarmingly lovely wife. When he glimpses a familiar face in the twilight at Las Acadas bar, it's hard at first to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him.

It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.

Following the discovery of the body of a well-loved parish priest at Ballyglass House - the Co Wexford family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family - Detective Inspector St John Strafford is called in from Dublin to investigate. Facing obstruction from all angles, Strafford is determined to identify the murderer. But, as the snow continues to fall over this ever expanding mystery, the people of Ballyglass are equally determined to keep their secrets.

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma.

1899. As the new century approaches, struggling English writer Evelyn Dolman—a hack, by his own description—marries Laura Rensselaer, daughter of an American oil tycoon. Evelyn anticipates that he and Laura will inherit a substantial fortune and lead a comfortable, settled life. But his hopes are dashed when a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, just before the patriarch’s death, leads to her disinheritance.

1899. As the new century approaches, English hack-writer Evelyn Dolman marries Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of a wealthy American plutocrat. But in the midst of a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, Evelyn's plans of a substantial inheritance are thrown into doubt. As the unhappy newlyweds travel to Venice at Palazzo Dioscuri - the ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo - a series of seemingly otherworldly occurrences exacerbate Evelyn's already frayed nerves: is it just the sea mist blanketing the floating city or is he losing his mind?

On a languid midsummer's day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician, is dying. His family gathers at his bedside: his son, young Adam, struggling to maintain his marriage to a radiantly beautiful actress; his 19-year-old daughter, Petra, filled with voices and visions as she waits for the inevitable; their mother, Ursula, whose relations with the Godley children are strained at best; and Petra's "young man" - very likely more interested in the father than the daughter - who has arrived for a superbly ill-timed visit.

1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn't approach, but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person's case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea. Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally - the flawed but brilliant pathologist Quirke - a man he is linked to in increasingly complicated ways.

Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in southern Germany, was one of the world’s greatest mathematicians and astronomers. The novel Kepler by John Banville brilliantly re-creates his life and his work, which laid the foundation of the universe even while he was being driven from exile to exile by religious and domestic strife. At the same time, it illuminates the harsh realities of the Renaissance world, rich in imaginative daring but rooted in poverty, squalor and the tyrannical power of emperors.

Christian Stern, an ambitious young scholar and alchemist, arrives in Prague in the bitter winter of 1599, intent on making his fortune at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, the eccentric Rudolf II. The night of his arrival, drunk and lost, Christian stumbles upon the body of a young woman in Golden Lane, an alley hard by Rudolf’s great castle. Dressed in a velvet gown, wearing a large gold medallion around her neck, the woman is clearly well-born—or was, for her throat has been slashed.

Once the big house on an Irish estate, Birchwood has turned into a dilapidated family manor filled with memories and despair. One disaster succeeds another, until young Gabriel Godkin runs away to join a traveling circus and look for his long-lost twin sister. Soon he discovers that famine and unrest stalk the countryside, and Ireland is ruined too.

When Dublin pathologist Quirke glimpses a familiar face while on holiday with his wife, it's hard, at first, to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him. Could she really be who he thinks she is, and have a connection with a crime that nearly brought ruin to an Irish political dynasty? Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home, and Detective St John Strafford is soon dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one on route: as a terrifying hitman hunts down his prey, they are all set for a brutal showdown.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a brilliantly haunting novel that forges an unforgettable amalgam of enchantment and menace that suggests both The Tempest and his own acclaimed The Book of Evidence.

1950s Dublin, in a lock-up garage in the city, the body of a young woman is discovered, an apparent suicide. But pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford soon suspect foul play. The victim's sister, a newspaper reporter from London, returns to Dublin to join the two men in their quest to uncover the truth. But, as they explore her links to a wealthy German family in County Wicklow, and to investigative work she may have been doing in Israel, they are confronted with an ever-deepening mystery.

When John Glass's billionaire father-in-law hires him to write his biography, he feels he can't refuse. Then his research assistant on the book discovers some very sensitive information about John's in-laws, and is murdered before he can tell anyone what he knows. John is on his own to find out the young man's secret, before the murderer finds him.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita.

Freddie Montgomery acaba de salir de prisión y es un hombre nuevo. Bajo el pseudónimo de Felix Mordaunt vuelve al viejo caserón de su infancia, donde ahora vive la familia del fallecido Adam Godley, el gran físico cuya teoría revolucionó la concepción del universo. Mordaunt se une a la constelación formada por el hijo eternamente a la sombra del famoso científico, su irresistible esposa Helen, una terca ama de llaves, un biógrafo enamorado —casi rival— y una mujer del pasado que le pide a Felix un inesperado y peligroso favor.