Ghosts

Description: 'A beautiful, beguiling book full of resonances that continue to sound long after you've turned the final page. Its imagining is magical, its execution dazzlingly skilful' - "Sunday Tribune". "Ghosts" opens with a shipwreck, leaving a party of sightseers temporarily marooned on an island. The stranded castaways make their way towards the refuge of the isle's reclusive savant; but the big isolated house which is home to Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic assistant, Licht, is also home to another, unnamed presence...Onto this seemingly haunted island, where a strange singing hangs in the air, Banville drops a scrumptious cast of characters - including a murderer - and weaves a tale where the details are clear but the conclusion polymorphous - shifting appearances, transformations and thwarted assumptions make this world of uneasy calm utterly enthralling. 'As fascinating, complex, stimulating and energetic as any work of art ...A work which proves Banville as a master, the artist in total control of his craft' - "The Times". 'John Banville's funniest book ...another triumph by our most outrageously inventive and daring novelist' - "Sunday Independent". 'Makes this astonishingly attractive novelist one of the most important writers now at work in English - a key thinker, in fact, in fiction' - "London Review of Books".

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, The Book of Evidence (shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize and winner of the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Award), 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.