John Banville - The Sea

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The author of The Untouchable (â contemporary fiction gets no better than thisâ â Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wifeâ s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a childâ a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twinsâ Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionlessâ in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the â barely bearable raw immediacyâ of his childhood memories.

Interwoven with this story are Mordenâ s memories of his wife, Annaâ of their life together, of her deathâ and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him â like a second heart.â

What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novelâ among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.

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