The Sea

John Banville

Random House Digital, Inc., Aug 15, 2006 - Fiction - 208 pages

In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, 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.

What people are saying

Review: The Sea

User Review  - David - Goodreads

I'm reasonably confident that I will never read this book, but I'm definitely clipping Barry Forshaw's incandescent review as fodder for my collection of hackneyed review cliches. In three taut ...

Review: The Sea

User Review  - Mmars - Goodreads

In a stream of thoughts, the narrator whose wife has just died of cancer, centers his memories around a childhood seaside summer and his relationship with the Graces, a family that bewildered and ...

Contents

• Section 1: 18
• Section 2: 20
• Section 3: 68
• Section 4: 79
• Section 5: 99
• Section 6: 109
• Section 7: 117
• Section 8: 119
• Section 9: 138
• Section 10: 163
• Section 11: 172
• Section 12: 194

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Sea; Vintage International
• Author: John Banville
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc., 2006
• ISBN: 1400097029, 9781400097029
• Length: 208 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary