Book description
Alexander Cleave, actor, has left his career and his family behind and
banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life,
but finds this impossible in a house brimming with presences, some
ghostly, some undeniably human. Memories, anxiety for the future and
more particularly for his beloved but troubled daughter, conspire to
distract him from his dreaming retirement. This humane and beautifully
written story tells the tragic tale of a man, intelligent, preposterous
and vulnerable, who in attempting to bring the performance to a close
finds himself travelling inevitably towards a devastating denouement.
'This unsparing, compassionate, humane book demonstrates again that
Banville is in a class of his own' Spectator 'A contemporary fable of
piercing sadness and melancholy beauty. . . This poetic novel deals with
archetypal themes as well as painful truths about parental inadequacy
and the limitations of love' Sunday Telegraph 'In Eclipse Banville has
created another important, challenging fiction. The book is ornately
written, heartless in an honest fashion, profoundly interrogative of
ideas of identity and, above all, spectacularly beautiful. It is, in a
way that so many contemporary novels are not, a work of art' Observer
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), Ghosts,
Athena, The Untouchable, Shroud and The
Sea. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation.
He lives in Dublin.
