Book Of Evidence, The (Winner Of The Gpa Award)

Description: Freddie Montgomery has committed two crimes. He stole a small Dutch master from a wealthy family friend, and he murdered a chambermaid who caught him in the act. He has little to say about the dead girl. He killed her, he says, because he was physically capable of doing so. It made perfect sense to smash her head in with a hammer. What he cannot understand, and would desperately like to know, is why he was so moved by an unattributed portrait of a middle-aged woman that he felt compelled to steal it ...'Banville has excelled himself in a flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita' Observer 'The Book of Evidence is a major work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within. Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift of seeing people's souls' Don DeLillo 'One of the most important writers now at work in English -- a key thinker, in fact, in fiction' London Review of Books 'Remarkable...If all crime novels were like this one, there would no longer be the need for a genre' Ruth Rendell

Review: " Here is an astonishing, disturbing little novel that might have been coughed up from hell." - "The New York Times Book Review"" Ireland' s finest contemporary novelist." - "The Economist"" The Book of Evidence is a major new work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within." - Don DeLillo





Author Biography: John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other books are Nightspawn , Birchwood, Doctor Copernicus (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976), Kepler (which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1981), The Newton Letter (which was filmed for Channel 4), Mefisto, Ghosts, Athena, The Untouchable, Eclipse, Shroud and The Sea. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

John Banville is a winner of the "Guardian" Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the GPA Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.