The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant, profoundly moving new novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: a meditation on love and loss, and on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives.

Is there any difference between memory and invention? That is the question that fuels this stunning novel, written with the depth of character, the clarifying lyricism and the sly humor that have marked all of John Banville’s extraordinary works. And it is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave, an actor in the twilight of his career and of his life, as he plumbs the memories of his first—and perhaps only—love (he, fifteen years old, the woman more than twice his age, the mother of his best friend; the situation impossible, thrilling, devouring and finally devastating) . . . and of his daughter, lost to a kind of madness of mind and heart that Cleave can only fail to understand. When his dormant acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role portraying a man who may not be who he says he is, his young leading lady—famous and fragile—unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see with aching clarity the “chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done.”

Ancient Light is a profoundly moving meditation on love and loss, on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives, on how invention shapes memory and memory shapes the man. It is a book of spellbinding power and pathos from one of the greatest masters of prose at work today.

*NATIONAL BESTSELLER*

Booker Prize winner John Banville returns with a dark and evocative new mystery set on the Spanish coast

Don’t disturb the dead…

On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cafes 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.

Because this young woman can’t be April Latimer. She was murdered by her brother, years ago–the conclusion to an unspeakable scandal that shook one of Ireland’s foremost political dynasties.

Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home to Ireland and soon Detective St. John Strafford is dispatched to Spain. But he’s not the only one en route. A relentless hit man is on the hunt for his latest prey, and the next victim might be Quirke himself.

Sumptous, propulsive and utterly transporting, April in Spain is the work of a master writer at the top of his game.

“Boutsikaris does a standout job. . . . Thug or cop, heiress or moll, he gives them all distinct voices that fit well with the book’s Chandleresque prose and dialogue.” —Publishers Weekly

“Dennis Boutsikaris narrates with marvelous aplomb. He nails the cool but inviting tone, the clipped tempo, the razor and the velvet of such a tale. . . . This is a perfect weekend listen.” —AudioFile

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe returns in award-winning author John Banville’s Marlowe–originally published as The Black-Eyed Blonde under the pen name Benjamin Black–the basis for the major motion picture starring Liam Neeson as the iconic detective.

“Somewhere Raymond Chandler is smiling . . . I loved this book. It was like having an old friend, one you assumed was dead, walk into the room.”
–Stephen King

“It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving.“

The streets of Bay City, California, in the early 1950s are as mean as they get. Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and the private eye business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: blond, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover.

Almost immediately, Marlowe discovers that the man’s disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City’s richest and most ruthless families–and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune.

“It’s vintage L.A., toots: The hot summer, rain on the asphalt, the woman with the lipstick, cigarette ash and alienation, V8 coupes, tough guys, snub-nosed pistols, the ice melting in the bourbon . . . . The results are Chandleresque, sure, but you can see Banville’s sense of fun.”
—The Washington Post

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, a dazzling and audacious new novel that extends the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, into unexpected territory.

Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naïve girl’s experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and—as Isabel finds out too late—cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate. On a trip to England to visit her cousin Ralph Touchett on his deathbed, Isabel is offered a chance to free herself from the marriage, but nonetheless chooses to return to Italy. Banville follows James’s story line to this point, but Mrs. Osmond is thoroughly Banville’s own: the narrative inventiveness; the lyrical precision and surprise of his language; the layers of emotional and psychological intensity; the subtle, dark humor. And when Isabel arrives in Italy—along with someone else!—the novel takes off in directions that James himself would be thrilled to follow.

*NATIONAL BESTSELLER*

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA HISTORICAL DAGGER AWARD*

A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

A New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick

“Banville sets up and then deftly demolishes the Agatha Christie format…superbly rich and sophisticated.”–New York Times Book Review

The incomparable Booker Prize winner’s next great crime novel–the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home

Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family.

The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford–flinty, visibly Protestant and determined to identify the murderer–faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate.

As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community’s secrets, like the snowfall itself, threaten to obliterate everything.

Beautifully crafted, darkly evocative and pulsing with suspense, Snow is “the Irish master” (New Yorker) John Banville at his page-turning best.

Don’t miss John Banville’s next novel, April in Spain!

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe returns in The Black-Eyed Blonde–also published as Marlowe as by John Banville–the basis for the major motion picture starring Liam Neeson as the iconic detective.

“Somewhere Raymond Chandler is smiling . . . I loved this book. It was like having an old friend, one you assumed was dead, walk into the room.”
–Stephen King

“It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving.“

The streets of Bay City, California, in the early 1950s are as mean as they get. Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and the private eye business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: blond, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover.

Almost immediately, Marlowe discovers that the man’s disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City’s richest and most ruthless families–and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune.

“It’s vintage L.A., toots: The hot summer, rain on the asphalt, the woman with the lipstick, cigarette ash and alienation, V8 coupes, tough guys, snub-nosed pistols, the ice melting in the bourbon . . . . The results are Chandleresque, sure, but you can see Banville’s sense of fun.”
—The Washington Post

TARGET CONSUMER: For readers of Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Flanagan, Roddy Doyle From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, a new novel–at once trenchant, witty, and shattering–about the intricacies of artistic creation and theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves. Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme, is a painter of some renown, and a petty thief who does not steal for profit and has never before been caught. But he’s pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well lately. Having recognized the “man-killing crevasse” that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it–any attempt to make what he sees his own–he’s stopped painting. And his last purloined possession–the last time he felt the “secret sliver of bliss” in thievery–has been discovered. The fact that it was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend, has compelled him to run away: from his mistress, his home, his wife, from whatever remains of his impulse to paint and from the tragedy that haunts him, and to sequester himself in the house where he was born, trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have. Excavating memories of family, of places he’s called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him (“no matter what else is going on, one of my eyes is always swiveling toward the world beyond”) Ollie reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself. A MODERN MASTER: A former Man Booker Prize winner (among a host of other awards), critically acclaimed and commercially adored, John Banville is essential reading for any fan of contemporary Irish and English literature. A HOUSE AUTHOR: Banville’s backlist has netted Vintage more than 300,000 copies in trade paperback. UK PUBLICATION: Penguin UK will publish their edition on the fall list, also. THE BOOK ITSELF: This is classic John Banville; a tense, fraught, and frequently comic mediation on the intricacies of human relations, on art, and especially, on the corrosive nature of jealousy. Praise for John Banville: “Banville is, without question, one of the great living masters of English-language prose.” –Los Angeles Times “A ray of hope for the future of fiction.” –The New Statesman (London) “With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov … His prose is sublime.” –The Sunday Telegraph (London) “Magnificent…. Treacherously smart and haunting.” –The Boston Globe “An extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory…. Undeniably brilliant.” –USA Today “The Book of Evidence is a major new work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within.” –Don DeLillo “Banville is the heir to Proust, via Nabokov…. Beautiful.” –The Daily Beast Author Bio: John Banville, the author of sixteen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin. Residence: Dublin, Ireland Hometown: Dublin, Ireland Author Site: http://www.john-banville.com/ Social: https://www.facebook.com/JohnBanvilleAuthor

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 nineteen-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.

But the Godley family is not alone in their vigil. Around them hovers a family of mischievous immortals—among them, Zeus, who has his eye on young Adam’s wife; Pan, who has taken the doughy, perspiring form of an old unwelcome acquaintance; and Hermes, who is the genial and omniscient narrator: “We too are petty and vindictive,” he tells us, “just like you, when we are put to it.” As old Adam’s days on earth run down, these unearthly beings start to stir up trouble, to sometimes wildly unintended effect. . . .

Blissfully inventive and playful, rich in psychological insight and sensual detail, The Infinities is at once a gloriously earthy romp and a wise look at the terrible, wonderful plight of being human—a dazzling novel from one of the most widely admired and acclaimed writers at work today.

*NATIONAL BESTSELLER*
A New York Times Editors’ Choice

Booker Prize winner and “Irish master” (The New Yorker) John Banville’s most ambitious crime novel yet brings two detectives together to solve a globe-spanning mystery

In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found dead in her car. Renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI St. John Strafford begin to investigate the death as a murder, but it’s the victim’s older sister Molly, an established journalist, who discovers a lead that could crack open the case.

One of Rosa’s friends, it turns out, is from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after World War II. But as Quirke and Strafford close in, their personal lives may put the case—and everyone involved—in peril, including Quirke’s own daughter.

Spanning the mountaintops of Italy, the front lines of World War II Bavaria, the gritty streets of Dublin and other unexpected locales, The Lock-Up is an ambitious and arresting mystery by one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

The author of The Untouchable (“contemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.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. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the “barely bearable raw immediacy” of his childhood memories. Interwoven with this story are Morden’s memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him “like a second heart.”What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.

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.

From the internationally acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes “a delicious memoir” (New York Times) that unfolds around the author’s recollections, experiences, and imaginings of Dublin.

As much about the life of the city as it is about a life lived, sometimes, in the city, John Banville’s “quasi-memoir” is as layered, emotionally rich, witty, and unexpected as any of his novels. Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived. And though, when he came of age and took up residence there, and the city became a frequent backdrop for his dissatisfactions (not playing an identifiable role in his work until the Quirke mystery series, penned as Benjamin Black), it remained in some part of his memory as fascinating as it had been to his seven-year-old self. And as he guides us around the city, delighting in its cultural, architectural, political, and social history, he interweaves the memories that are attached to particular places and moments. The result is both a wonderfully idiosyncratic tour of Dublin, and a tender yet powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man.