Mostrando resultados por autor "John Banville" en Todas las categorías

Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After the announcement in the Commons, the hasty revelation of his double life of wartime espionage, his photograph is all over the papers. His disgrace is public, his position as curator of the Queen’s pictures terminated… Maskell writes his own testament, in an act not unlike the restoration of one of his beloved pictures, in order for the process of verification and attribution to begin.

In 1950s Ireland the Catholic Church controls the lives of nearly everyone. But when Quirke’s daughter, Phoebe, loses her close friend Jimmy Minor to murder, Quirke can no longer play by the Church’s rules. Along with Inspector Hackett, his sometime partner, Quirke investigates Jimmy’s death and learns just how far the Church and its supporters will go to protect their own interests.

When Dublin pathologist Quirke glimpses a familiar face while on holiday with his wife, it's hard, at first, to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him. Could she really be who he thinks she is, and have a connection with a crime that nearly brought ruin to an Irish political dynasty? Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home, and Detective St John Strafford is soon dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one on route: as a terrifying hitman hunts down his prey, they are all set for a brutal showdown.

Alexander Cleave, actor, has left his career and his family behind and banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life, but finds this impossible in a house brimming with presences, some ghostly, some undeniably human. Memories, anxiety for the future, and more particularly, for his beloved but troubled daughter, conspire to distract him from his dreaming retirement.

Following the discovery of the body of a well-loved parish priest at Ballyglass House - the Co Wexford family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family - Detective Inspector St John Strafford is called in from Dublin to investigate. Facing obstruction from all angles, Strafford is determined to identify the murderer. But, as the snow continues to fall over this ever expanding mystery, the people of Ballyglass are equally determined to keep their secrets.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a brilliantly haunting novel that forges an unforgettable amalgam of enchantment and menace that suggests both The Tempest and his own acclaimed The Book of Evidence.

Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in southern Germany, was one of the world’s greatest mathematicians and astronomers. The novel Kepler by John Banville brilliantly re-creates his life and his work, which laid the foundation of the universe even while he was being driven from exile to exile by religious and domestic strife. At the same time, it illuminates the harsh realities of the Renaissance world, rich in imaginative daring but rooted in poverty, squalor and the tyrannical power of emperors.

1899. As the new century approaches, struggling English writer Evelyn Dolman—a hack, by his own description—marries Laura Rensselaer, daughter of an American oil tycoon. Evelyn anticipates that he and Laura will inherit a substantial fortune and lead a comfortable, settled life. But his hopes are dashed when a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, just before the patriarch’s death, leads to her disinheritance.

Sixteenth-century Europe is teeming with change and controversy: wars are being waged by princes and bishops and the repercussions of Luther are being felt through a convulsing Germany. In a remote corner of Poland, a modest canon is practicing medicine and studying the heavens, preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe. In this astonishing work of historical imagination, John Banville offers a vivid portrait of a man of painful reticence.

Christian Stern, an ambitious young scholar and alchemist, arrives in Prague in the bitter winter of 1599, intent on making his fortune at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, the eccentric Rudolf II. The night of his arrival, drunk and lost, Christian stumbles upon the body of a young woman in Golden Lane, an alley hard by Rudolf’s great castle. Dressed in a velvet gown, wearing a large gold medallion around her neck, the woman is clearly well-born—or was, for her throat has been slashed.

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma.

Once the big house on an Irish estate, Birchwood has turned into a dilapidated family manor filled with memories and despair. One disaster succeeds another, until young Gabriel Godkin runs away to join a traveling circus and look for his long-lost twin sister. Soon he discovers that famine and unrest stalk the countryside, and Ireland is ruined too.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Mrs Osmond by John Banville, read by Amy Finegan. 'What was freedom, she thought, other than the right to exercise one's choices?' Isabel Osmond, a spirited, intelligent young heiress, flees to London after being betrayed by her husband, to be with her beloved cousin Ralph on his deathbed. After a sombre, silent existence at her husband's Roman palazzo, Isabel's daring escape to London reawakens her youthful quest for freedom and independence.

1950s Dublin, in a lock-up garage in the city, the body of a young woman is discovered, an apparent suicide. But pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford soon suspect foul play. The victim's sister, a newspaper reporter from London, returns to Dublin to join the two men in their quest to uncover the truth. But, as they explore her links to a wealthy German family in County Wicklow, and to investigative work she may have been doing in Israel, they are confronted with an ever-deepening mystery.

Huyendo de Roma y de un matrimonio demoledor, Isabel Osmond viaja a Londres, donde se repone de la reciente revelación de la traición de su marido durante largos años. ¿Qué hacer ahora, qué camino debería seguir, y cuál es la salida del complejo laberinto emocional en el que lleva tanto tiempo atrapada? Bajo el estímulo del dolor y la certeza de haber sido seriamente agraviada, está determinada a reemprender la búsqueda de libertad e independencia que animó su juventud.

When John Glass's billionaire father-in-law hires him to write his biography, he feels he can't refuse. Then his research assistant on the book discovers some very sensitive information about John's in-laws, and is murdered before he can tell anyone what he knows. John is on his own to find out the young man's secret, before the murderer finds him.

On a languid midsummer's day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician, is dying. His family gathers at his bedside: his son, young Adam, struggling to maintain his marriage to a radiantly beautiful actress; his 19-year-old daughter, Petra, filled with voices and visions as she waits for the inevitable; their mother, Ursula, whose relations with the Godley children are strained at best; and Petra's "young man" - very likely more interested in the father than the daughter - who has arrived for a superbly ill-timed visit.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita.

1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn't approach, but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person's case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea. Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally - the flawed but brilliant pathologist Quirke - a man he is linked to in increasingly complicated ways.

En una época de mentes cerradas en la que reinaban el caos y una concepción errónea del universo aceptada desde hacía siglos, unos pocos hombres se atrevieron a cuestionar esa visión, decididos a descubrir y revelar cómo funcionaba el mundo.