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Ancient Light (Paperback)

By John Banville

$15.00

Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now

Description

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant, profoundly moving new novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: a meditation on love and loss, and on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives.

Is there any difference between memory and invention? That is the question that fuels this stunning novel, written with the depth of character, the clarifying lyricism and the sly humor that have marked all of John Banville’s extraordinary works. And it is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave, an actor in the twilight of his career and of his life, as he plumbs the memories of his first—and perhaps only—love (he, fifteen years old, the woman more than twice his age, the mother of his best friend; the situation impossible, thrilling, devouring and finally devastating) . . . and of his daughter, lost to a kind of madness of mind and heart that Cleave can only fail to understand. When his dormant acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role portraying a man who may not be who he says he is, his young leading lady—famous and fragile—unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see with aching clarity the “chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done.”

Ancient Light is a profoundly moving meditation on love and loss, on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives, on how invention shapes memory and memory shapes the man. It is a book of spellbinding power and pathos from one of the greatest masters of prose at work today.

About the Author

John Banville, the author of fifteen previous novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.

Praise for Ancient Light…

“A wise, sad and achingly gorgeous book.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Transcendent. . . . [Banville’s] prose . . . has a kind of luxuriant beauty, and, given the number of gorgeous arias written in different keys in many sharps and flats, the novel has a feel of a feverish atonal chamber opera. . . . One reads Ancient Light in a state of slightly stunned admiration.”
—Charles Baxter, The New York Review of Books

“A brilliant meditation on desire and loss.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“An adolescent love story comparable with Turgenev’s great novella ‘First Love.’ Seamless, profound . . . it is an unsettling and beautiful work.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Flashes with comedy. . . . [Filled with] Banville’s brilliant prose.”
—The Plain Dealer

“The most striking thing about the book is the language. Line after line is stuffed with poetic effects.”
—The New Yorker

“[A] meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears. The Stockholm jury should pick up the phone now.” —The Financial Times

“A luminous, breathtaking work. . . . Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence, the body yearning for sexual experience, the mind blurring eroticism and emotion. . . . [He] 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.”
—The Independent (London)

“Beautiful. . . . Banville is the heir to Proust, via Nabokov.”
—The Daily Beast

“A haunting vision of a past slipping away even as it is pursued.”
—The Columbus Dispatch

“Ancient Light lives up to its title as an accomplished tale of the tricks of memory and time that both comfort and deceive.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“The prose is precise, beautiful, musical, freshly sprung. . . . Catch [the light] right, as Banville does, and everything is illuminated.”
—The Times (London)

“Sulky, sordid, and moving. The language soars, full of the beauty of nature and the sadness of loss.”
—Marie Claire (UK)

“Shows how first love remains our only love, how it spawns the pattern of our desires, how it imprints Eros on the soul. . . . Banville is such a masterful writer that we never lose our focus. . . . Heartbreaking.”
—The Wichita Eagle

“Banville, a writer of exquisite precision and emotional depth, writes with droll inquisition and entrancing sensuality in this suspenseful drama of the obliviousnessness of lust and the weight of grief.”
—Booklist (starred)