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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 has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.
The narrator of this slippery fiction is an etiolated, disgraced former curator of the Queen's pictures at Buckingham Palace. As the novel opens he has been betrayed. His secret life is laid out in the tabloids for all to gaze upon; but this version too is revealed as a superficial construction. Even the most straightforward life contains its shadowy recesses, duplicities and evasions - and the life of Victor Maskell has been far from straightforward. Bollinger Bolshevism at Cambridge in the 1930s, wartime espionage, a life of denial lived at the heart of the Establishment. Banville, the author of The Book of Evidence, knows that the most treacherous enemies within are not political but metaphysical. He writes, 'everything was itself and at the same time something else'. This subtle and beautifully written book draws out the hidden truths behind the statement. (Kirkus UK)
