The Sea - (Vintage International) by John Banville (Paperback)

About the Book

Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman returns to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child--a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without his recently deceased wife. It is also a return to the place where he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time and his memories of the past.

Book Synopsis

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - An "extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife.

In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.

What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel--among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

Review Quotes

"Remarkable. . . . The power and strangeness and piercing beauty of [The Sea is] a wonder." --The Washington Post Book World

"With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov. . . . The Sea [is] his best novel so far." --The Sunday Telegraph
"A gem. . . . [The sea] is a presence on every page, its ceaseless undulations echoing constantly in the cadences of the prose. This novel shouldn't simply be read. It needs to be heard, for its sound is intoxicating. . . . A winning work of art." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"The Sea offers an extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory. . . . Undeniably brilliant." --USA Today

About the Author

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. The author of thirteen previous novels, he has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.