Book 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
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.
