Ghosts
John Banville
05 March 2010
9780330371858Synopsis
‘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 big isolated house which is home to the reclusive Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic assistant, Licht, but it is also home to another, unnamed presence . . .
Onto this seemingly haunted island, where a strange singing hangs in the air, John Banville drops an intriguing 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
