Ghosts

by John Banville

Overview

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.

"A surreal and exquisitely lyrical new novel by one of the great stylists writing in English today." —The Boston Globe

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679755128
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/08/1994
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	543,597
Product dimensions:	5.16(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

The narrator of this lyrical novel by the author of The Book of Evidence banishes himself to a deserted island inhabited by two other castaways. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A bedraggled medley of castaways from a day outing wash ashore a remote island. Led by Felix, the unctuous, mutable ``lord of the streets,'' they include many of the same Faustian types--the innocent girl, the moribund gentleman--who inhabit Banville's previous fiction, The Book of Evidence ( LJ 3/1/90) and Mephisto (Godine, 1989). They have, perhaps, walked ``straight out of the deepest longings'' of the forsaken trio already sentenced to live on that island: an art expert with dubious credentials, Professor Kreutnaer; his disgruntled, lovelorn assistant Licht; and the familiar ex-convict who is also our first-person narrator. Banville is not so much interested in the plight of the castaways, whom he arranges in a tableau vivant and then abandons, as he is in the criminal descent and groping atonement of his hapless narrator. Here Banville's quirky, Beckettian stream-of-consciousness takes off: pathetic, noble, hilarious, this narrator is an utterly original ``little god.'' The novel, though in some ways incomplete, is an exuberant, virtuosic display.-- Amy Boaz, ``Library Journal''

Library Journal