The Sea

John Banville is an Irish novelist and screenwriter born in 1945. He sometimes writes under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Banville is known for the dark humor of his arch narrators and his cold, inventive prose style.

In this novel, Banville's main character is Max Morden, an art historian, who has recently suffered the demise of his beloved wife Anna. It is a journey back down the earliest roadways and alleys of Max's memory. Intertwined within this story are Max’s memories of his wife, Anna and of their life together; his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, who is 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 “like a second heart.” John Banville, famous for his poetic language, now gives us a uniquely reflective novel about loss, love and the transfiguring power of memory.