John Banville

" Anna est morte avant l'aube. À dire vrai, je n'étais pas là quand c'est arrivé. J'étais allé sur le perron de la clinique respirer à fond l'air noir et lustré du matin. Et pendant ce moment si calme, si lugubre, j'ai repensé à un autre moment, des années auparavant, dans l'eau, ce fameux été à Ballymoins. J'étais …

Ghosts is a novel by Irish writer John Banville. Published in 1993, it was his first novel since The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The second in what Banville described as a "triptych", to make "an investigation of the way in which the imagination works." This novel features many of the …

Hugo von Hoffmannsthal made his mark as a poet, as a playwright, and as the librettist for Richard Strauss’s greatest operas, but he was no less accomplished as a writer of short, strangely evocative prose works. The atmospheric stories and sketches collected here—fin-de-siècle fairy tales from the Vienna of Klimt and …

The Untouchable is a 1997 novel by the Irish writer John Banville. The book is written as a roman à clef, presented from the point of view of the art historian, double agent and homosexual Victor Maskell—a character based largely on Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt and in part on Irish poet Louis MacNeice. The character of …

A work of dazzling imagination, Mefisto, like John Banville's other novels, takes as its theme the price the true scientist or artist must pay for his calling in terms of his own humanity, his ability to live fully. Like his Copernicus, Kepler, and the nameless narrator of The Newton Letter, the central character of …