Alex Cleave è un celebre autore di teatro, amato dal pubblico e dalla critica, ma in profonda crisi esistenziale per aver smarrito il senso della propria realtà individuale: sempre più estraneo a tutto e a sé, sempre più isolato in un mondo che non comprende, sempre più incapace di entrare in rapporto con gli altri, durante una recita subisce una drammatica crisi che lo allontana dalle scene. Per ritrovarsi Alex si rifugia da solo nella vecchia casa dei genitori, lasciandosi alle spalle tanto la moglie quanto la figlia vittima di un oscuro disagio psichico. Le vecchie stanze ospitano memorie lontane e silenziose presenze di fantasmi. Ma si tratta di ricordi materializzati, di proiezioni del subconscio o di incerti presagi?

A melancholy ghost story which tells the tragic tale of a man, intelligent, preposterous and vulnerable, who, in attempting to bring the performance to a close, finds himself travelling inevitably towards a devastating }denouement{. "Spectacula

John Banville's stunning powers of mimicry are brilliantly on display in this engrossing novel, the darkly compelling confession of an improbable murderer.

Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband and father living the life of a dissolute exile on a Mediterranean island. When a debt comes due and his wife and child are held as collateral, he returns to Ireland to secure funds. That pursuit leads to murder. And here is his attempt to present evidence, not of his innocence, but of his life, of the events that lead to the murder he committed because he could. Like a hero out of Nabokov or Camus, Montgomery is a chillingly articulate, self-aware, and amoral being, whose humanity is painfully on display.

A powerful fictional evocation of the tormented life of the Polish astronomer. "A tour de force: exciting, beautifully written and astonishingly redolent of the late mediaeval world" }The Times{. "Superb" }The Economist{. The first of three Ban

New edition of Banville's intellectual thriller, a reworking of the Dr Faustus theme. "Beautifully written" }Punch{.

Picador will be putting their biggest paperback marketing campaign of 1998 behind this title. It is a fictional portrayal of the Cambridge spies written in the form of a journal kept by Victor Maskell. Victor's wartime espionage has just been r

Picador are very pleased to have these three important novels from John Banville on their lists. They publish these editions alongside the new paperback, }The Untouchable{.

One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation?

As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold doubleness: Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and lover of men; betrayer and dupe. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskell's co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity, The Untouchable places John Banville in the select company of both Conrad and le Carre.

Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction

"Contemporary fiction gets no better than this... Banville's books teem with life and humor." - Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review
"Victor Maskell is one of the great characters in recent fiction... The Untouchable is the best work of art in any medium on [its] subject." -Washington Post Book World
"As remarkable a literary voice as any to come out of Ireland; Joyce and Beckett notwithstanding." -San Francisco Chronicle

A partire dagli anni Trenta un gruppo di intellettuali inglesi, formatisi all'università di Cambridge, diede vita ad una vera e propria banda di spie che si pose al servizio dell'Unione Sovietica. Da questo fatto autentico John Banville ha tratto lo spunto per il suo romanzo, dando all'io narrante, Victor Maskel, i connotati di una figura notissima: Sir Anthony Blunt, storico dell'arte e intimo della famiglia reale, che di quel gruppo fece parte. Il romanzo ha inizio quando Maskel, tradito da un amico, viene scoperto e additato al pubblico ludibrio; da quel momento il protagonista incomincia a ripercorrere quella straordinaria vicenda che è stata la doppia vita sua e dei suoi compagni.

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Book of Evidence and Ghosts comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita. "A strange and dreamlike book . . . Banville has a breathtaking style."--Boston Globe.

In this brilliantly haunting new novel, John Banville forges an unforgettable amalgam of enchantment and menace that suggests both The Tempest and his own acclaimed The Book of Evidence. "A surreal and exquisitely lyrical new novel by one of the great stylists writing in English today."--Boston Globe.

Retells the life of the sixteenth-century cleric whose ideas demolished the medieval view of the universe

Offers a fictional portrait of scientist-astronomer Johannes Kepler and a recreation of the religious upheaval, political turmoil, scientific discoveries, and significant personages of early seventeenth-century Europe