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.

This is one of the most startling of the century's varied achievements in Irish writing' Seamus Deane

This beautiful, melancholy ghost story will captivate every discerning reader; 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, all conspire to distract him from his dreaming retirement. This humane and beautifully written story tells the tragic tale of a man, intelligent, preposterous and vulnerable, who in...

Axel Vander, distinguished intellectual and elderly academic, is not the man he seems. When a letter arrives out of the blue, threatening to unveil his secrets - and carefully concealed identity - Vander travels to Turin to meet its author. There, muddled by age and alcohol, unable always to distinguish fact from fiction, Vander comes face to face with the woman who has the knowledge to unmask him, Cass Cleave. However, her sense of reality is as unreliable as his, and the two are quickly drawn together, their relationship dark, disturbed and doomed to disaster from its very start.

The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1989 and The Sea, which won the Booker prize in 2005, take us into the hauntingly confused worlds of two ageing male protagonists - washed-up scientist Freddie Montgomery, desperate to explain why he is being held in an Irish prison for murder (The Book of Evidence) and recently widowed art historian Max Morden, who has returned to a sleepy seaside boarding house to relive the events of his first adolescent awakenings (The Sea). With spellbinding virtuosity, Banville piles ambiguity upon ambiguity to construct tense tales of sex,...