PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fifteen novels. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other works include 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, Ghosts, Athena, The Untouchable, Eclipse, Shroud and The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. He was recently awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Dublin.
Remarkable. . . If all crime novels were like this one, there would no longer be the need for a genre -- Ruth Rendell, author of the Inspector Wexford series The Book of Evidence is a major work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within. Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift of seeing people's souls -- Don DeLillo, author of <i>Underworld</i>, <i>Cosmopolis</i> and <i>Mao II</i> Banville has excelled himself in a flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita * Observer * One of the most important writers now at work in English - a key thinker, in fact, in fiction * London Review of Books *
