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Product Description
Product Description
‘A beautiful, beguiling book full of resonances that continue to sound long after you’ve turned the final page. Its imagining is magical, its execution dazzlingly skilful.’ Sunday Tribune
Ghosts opens with a shipwreck, leaving a party of sightseers temporarily marooned on an island. The stranded castaways make their way towards the refuge of the isle’s reclusive savant; but the big isolated house which is home to Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic assistant, Licht, is also home to another, unnamed presence . . .
Onto this seemingly haunted island, where a strange singing hangs in the air, Banville drops a scrumptious cast of characters – including a murderer – and weaves a tale where the details are clear but the conclusion polymorphous – shifting appearances, transformations and thwarted assumptions make this world of uneasy calm utterly enthralling.
‘As fascinating, complex, stimulating and energetic as any work of art . . . A work which proves Banville as a master, the artist in total control of his craft’ The Times
‘John Banville’s funniest book . . . another triumph by our most outrageously inventive and daring novelist’ Sunday Independent
‘Makes this astonishingly attractive novelist one of the most important writers now at work in English – a key thinker, in fact, in fiction’ London Review of Books
About the Author
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other books are Nightspawn , Birchwood, Doctor Copernicus (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976), Kepler (which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1981), The Newton Letter (which was filmed for Channel 4), Mefisto, The Book of Evidence (shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize and winner of the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Award), Athena, The Untouchable, Eclipse , Shroud and The Sea. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.
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Customer Reviews
It takes the form of a series of memories and re-interpretations of the main characters past (the ghosts of the title) as he tries (largely without sucess) to figure out the motivations behind both his actions and his very "self".
'Ghosts' is also peopled with characters from Banvilles earlier masterpiece, 'Mephisto', and to read 'Ghosts' without first having read 'Mephisto' and 'The Book of Evidence' would undoubtedly be a severely diminished experience...But to read it in the context of Banvilles other work is to become utterly immersed and seduced by his world.
This is imaginative writing of the very highest order, dripping with wonder and insight, not, perhaps, as immediately exciting as'The Book of Evidence', but ulimately a much deeper and more profound work.
Like all of Banvilles books 'Ghosts' is also tremendously witty. With the author at his most Nabokov-ian numerous passages demand to be read out-loud to anyone within ear-shot!
So, to sum-up, this is one of the best (possibly the very best) works by a writer who stands head and shoulders above all his other other Anglo-Irish literary contemporaries...need I say more?
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