John Banville

When Quirke travels to the coast of San Sebastian, Spain for some relaxation, he sees a woman who he believes had been murdered by her brother several years prior. On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cǎfs 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...

1957. Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate when a parish priest is found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family. The Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist, and Strafford-- a Protestant-- faces obstruction at every turn. There is a culture of silence in this tight-knit community, and Stafford learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem....

"A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sportscar--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...

Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman returns 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 his recently deceased wife. It is also a return to the place where he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time and his memories of the past.

Presents a memoir of the author's life near Dublin, a city that inspired his imagination and literary life and served as a backdrop for the dissatisfactions of adult years shaped by Dublin's cultural, political, architectural, and social history. "Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, author John Banville...saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child. It was first a birthday treat, the world his beloved, eccentric...

A woman passes as a man in order to work and survive in 19th century Ireland. Some thirty years after donning men's clothing, she finds herself trapped in a prison of her own making.