John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fourteen previous novels including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. He was recently awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Dublin.
Brilliant. Banville excels in his brightly lit descriptions of self-absorbed teenage lust Guardian This dazzling novel captures a long-lost adolescent world of passion and desire. Independent Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence, the body yearning for sexual experience, the mind blurring eroticism and emotion ... Banville is a Nabokovian artist, his prose so rich, poetic and packed with startling imagery that reading it is akin to gliding regally through a lake of praline: it's a slow, stately process, delicious and to be savoured ... This is a luminous breathtaking work Independent on Sunday Glittering visual evocation, expressed in a tone at once fresh and wistfully ironic ... a world at once random, dreamlike and deeply experienced The Sunday Times 4 STARS. Banville proves here over and over that one can write with the true texture if erotic memory without resorting to titillation. He deserves to outsell Fifty Shades of Grey tenfold. Sunday Express 4 STARS. Prose that lingers on every last physical and psychological detail. Metro A novel about sexual awakening and the tricks that memory plays. Banville's lushly gorgeous prose enhances a mood of brooding passion in a place of secrets The I We now want them [novels] to provoke, cajole, edify, entertain, puzzle, divert, clarify and console. Banville's new novel does all these things and much more besides. Irish Independent Ancient Light also bears resemblance to Lolita that extend beyond the obvious hallmark ecstatic prose..different periods of his life blending into a single meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears. The Financial Times Banville does regretful roues better than almost anyone ... His use of language can also be startlingly brilliant ... Terrific ... full of sadness and yearning. Sunday Telegraph ... ravishingly written and scrupulously observed Irish Times The Booker prize winning author - widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in English today - has produced what many already consider a literary masterpiece. Sunday Independent Banville, with his forensic sensory memory, his great gift for textural (and textual) precision, his ability to inhabit not just a room, as a writer, but also the full weight of a breathing body, is exactly in his element here. Observer A beautifully written tale of youthful passion Good Housekeeping A bittersweet rumination on first love ... The language soars, full of the beauty of nature and the sadness of loss Marie Claire