Told with lyrical prose, John Banville's Birchwood is the elegiac story of the aristocratic decline of an eccentric family riddled with dark secrets.Once the big house on an Irish estate, Birchwood has turned into a baroque madhouse for its ruined inhabitants. One disaster succeeds another, until young Gabriel Godkin runs away to join a travelling circus and look for his long-lost twin sister. Soon he discovers that famine and unrest stalk the countryside, and Ireland is ruined too.

BIRCHWOOD

Salué comme son oeuvre la plus aboutie, le nouveau roman de John Banville devrait enfin permettre de faire découvrir aux lecteurs français l'un des plus grands stylistes de notre temps.
Qui est vraiment Axel Vander, le héros d'Impostures ? Une parabole magistralement construite, dans une langue superbe, autour du thème de l'usurpation d'identité. Éminent professeur de renommée internationale, Axel Vander vit en vieux misanthrope dans sa retraite dorée de Californie. Auréolé de la gloire des livres qu'il a écrits, mais dans une prison morale, affective et intellectuelle : sa femme Magda, morte, l'habite tel un fantôme, ne lui laissant pas plus de répit que le secret qui le ronge. Car Axel Vander est un imposteur, sur le point d'être démasqué par l'étrange jeune femme qui l'attend à Turin. Où rien ne se passera comme il l'avait manigancé.

Un roman envoûtant, plein de trouble et de sensualité, sur les vacillements du « moi » et la rédemption par l'amour.
Une réflexion à la fois poignante et grinçante sur la vieillesse, la folie, le dernier amour, et les masques derrière lesquels se cache un improbable « je ». Servi par une écriture ciselée au mot près, du grand art romanesque.

Impostures

'A nearly perfectly fashioned work of art' - Irish TimesThe third in his thematically-connected Revolutions Trilogy, The Newton Letter is an exceptional work of literature from John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea. A historian, on the brink of completing a book on Isaac Newton, rents a cottage in southern Ireland for the summer. As the summer wears on and he dissects Newton's mental collapse of 1693 he becomes distracted by the mysterious occupants of Fern House and finds himself constructing their imagined histories to powerful effect. His elaborate attempts to decipher the complex web of relationships are, however, far from accurate .

The Newton Letter

L'intouchable

Examines the lives of the Cambridge spies, and in particular Anthony Blunt. The story is told by Blunt, in the form of a journal which starts on the "first day of the new life". The author uses the "secret life" as a way to explore the darker realms of the 20th century and its hidden minds.

THE UNTOUCHABLE

'Superbly illuminates the man, the time, and the everlasting quest for knowledge' Observer Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in south Germany, was one of the world's greatest mathematicians and astronomers. The novel Kepler, by John Banville, brilliantly recreates his life and his incredible drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe while 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.

Kepler

Le Livre des aveux est la confession d'un homme inculpé et incarcéré pour l'enlèvement et le meurtre horrible, apparemment sans mobile, d'une jeune femme. Tout au long d'un fascinant monologue, l'assassin - Frederick St John Vanderveld Montgomery, aristocrate désargenté - tente de justifier face à ses juges le crime qui a détruit sa vie... Mais derrière les raisons invoquées, derrière l'apparente et imperturbable logique policière, c'est l'exploration minutieuse et glacée d'une conscience coupable qui donne à ce livre son inquiétante résonance.

Le Livre des aveux

Johannes Kepler, master mathematician and astronomer, developed his theories in 16th century pre-Renaissance Germany. His work laid the foundation on which his successors, notably Isaac Newton, built the modern picture of the universe, that held until Einstein.The author shows us a Rabelaisian world...chaotic, muddled, and dirty. Kepler's famly mirrored this disorder, and he retreated into his own cerebrations for relief. Kepler took the theories of his time and stood them on their head. He extracted truth from superstition, and this story, in Banville's hands, is a triumph, heroic and exuberant."

Inspired by the crimes of Malcolm Macarthur in Ireland, 1982, The Book of Evidence by John Banville is a gripping portrait of a cold, deceptive and utterly unprecedented killer.'Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift of seeing people's souls' - Don DeLillo, author of White Noise and LibraFreddie Montgomery has committed two crimes. He stole a small Dutch master - an unattributed painting of a middle-aged woman - from a wealthy family friend. And he murdered a chambermaid who caught him in the act, bludgeoning her to death with a hammer. An eccentric narcissist, he has little to say about the woman he killed. He travels through life without any apparent remorse. He killed her, he says, because he was physically capable of it. It made sense to him. However, as he narrates his testimony, there is one thing he cannot understand. One thing he would desperately like to know. Why did he want to steal the painting?With extra material for the 25th anniversary, including an introduction by Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize'Remarkable' - Ruth Rendell, author of the Inspector Wexford novelsThe Book of Evidence is the first in John Banville's acclaimed Frames Trilogy. It is followed by Ghosts and Athena.

BIRCHWOOD

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