****BOOKER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - An "extraordinary
meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA
Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to
grieve the loss of his wife.
In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a
middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he
spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his
wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the
well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of
both love and death for the first time.
What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible
effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written
novel--among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.