Author(s): John Banville

Novel | Ireland

A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car also borrowed onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems.

In the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request.

With sparkling intelligence and rapier wit, John Banville revisits some of his career s most memorable figures, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived. The Singularities occupies a singular space and will surely be one of his most admired works.

Review: "Reading John Banville is like being in the presence of a fathomlessly talented, witty, and intelligent magician-someone so captivatingly masterful at their craft, you suspect that they could make you disappear. The Singularities proves that [Banville] deserves a summons from Stockholm . . . Time and again Banville stuns with sentences so dazzling they're like a lightning-quick boxer's jab."-Randy Rosenthal, Boston Globe
"A triumphant piece of writing . . . John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance that it's all too easy to view his work as an aesthetic project . . . Like much of his best work, [The Singularities] aims to both scrutinize and confront one of the central challenges of the human endeavor: how to create an accurate portrait of things . . . Exhilarating." -Leo Robson, New York Times Book Review
"Flick to any page in any of his novels and soon you will come to a sentence or an image so perfectly contrived it stops you for a moment, achingly, like a beautiful stranger passing in the street. The Singularities is no different . . . In The Singularities Banville channels the spirit of Vladimir Nabokov, one of his literary deities." -Tom Ball, The Times (London)
"One can linger in the lushness of the prose and admire the extraordinary capaciousness of Banville's unique imagination . . . Banville is one of the most substantial Irish writers of the past 50 years. In this book, as in others, he has created a work that meditates in highly sophisticated ways on the nature of reality, existence, knowledge, art, love, and death. His continued experimentalism marks him out as the most eminent innovator in Irish fiction of the last 50 years." -Eoghan Smith, Irish Times
"A beguiling book . . . Astonishingly lovely."-Claire Allfree, Daily Mail
"John Banville is a marvellous and rewarding novelist . . . You read him-at least, I read him-for the prose, the richness of the characterization, all the better for seldom being fully fleshed-out, for the glittering and sometimes mischievous intelligence, and most of all for his uncanny ability to render mood and atmosphere into verbal pictures . . . Nobody does this sort of thing better . . . He is a magician, really." -Allan Massie, The Scotsman
"A feast for Banville superfans and newbies alike, The Singularities is a multiverse triumph." -Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire 
"An artful and atmospheric story of redemption . . . With penetrating psychological insight, Banville tracks the private struggles of these mismatched trespassers . . . The book boasts some of Banville's greatest prose . . . A fine addition to a brilliant body of work."-Publishers Weekly

Author Biography: JOHN BANVILLE, the author of seventeen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He lives in Dublin.

Author Biography: JOHN BANVILLE, the author of seventeen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He lives in Dublin.