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.

• April in Spain

Banville sets up and then deftly demolishes the Agatha Christie format... Superbly rich and sophisticated. --New York Times Book Review

Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family.

The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford--flinty, visibly Protestant and determined to identify the murderer--faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate.

As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community's secrets, like the snowfall itself, threaten to obliterate everything.

Beautifully crafted, darkly evocative and pulsing with suspense, Snow is the Irish master (New Yorker) John Banville at his page-turning best.

• Snow

The hero of Christine Falls, Quirke, is a surly pathologist living in 1950s Dublin. One night, after having a few drinks at a party, he returns to the morgue to find his brother-in-law tampering with the records on a young woman's corpse. The next morning, when his hangover has worn off, Quirke reluctantly begins looking into the woman's history. He discovers a plot that spans two continents, implicates the Catholic Church, and may just involve members of his own family. He is warned--first subtly, then with violence--to lay off, but Quirke is a stubborn man. The first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of John Banville's writing to the dark, menacing atmosphere of a first-class thriller.

It has been two years since the events of Christine Falls, the bestselling novel that introduced the world to an irascible Dublin pathologist named Quirke. Quirke's beloved Sarah has died, his surrogate father lies paralyzed by a stroke, and he's been sober for half a year. When a near-forgotten acquaintance asks him to cover up his beautiful young wife's apparent suicide, Quirke knows he should stay clear, for the sake of his sobriety and his peace of mind. But his old itch is irresistible, and before long he is probing further into the circumstances of Deidre Hunt's death, into a web of drugs and illicit sex that may have snared his own daughter, Phoebe. With its vivid, intense evocation of 1950s Dublin, and intricate, psychologically complex storyline, The Silver Swan is even more engrossing than last year's Christine Falls (Entertainment Weekly).

As John Banville writes in his introduction to The Love Object, Edna O'Brien is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time. The thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without.

Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked and some carry O'Brien's distinct sense of the comical. In A Rose in the Heart of New York, the single-mindedness of love dramatically derails the relationship between a girl and her mother, while in Sister Imelda and The Creature the strong ties between teacher and student and mother and son are ultimately broken. The Love Object recounts a passionate affair between the narrator and her older lover.

The magnificent, mid-career title story from Lantern Slides portrays a Dublin dinner party that takes on the lives and loves of all the guests. More recent stories include Shovel Kings -- a masterpiece of compression, distilling the pain of a lost, exiled generation (Sunday Times) -- and Old Wounds, which follows the revival and demise of the friendship between two elderly cousins.

In 2011, Edna O'Brien's gifts were acknowledged with the most prestigious international award for the story, the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. The Love Object illustrates a career's worth of shimmering, potent prose from a writer of great courage, vision, and heart.

The most striking aspect of Edna O'Brien's short stories, aside from the consistent mastery with which they are executed, is their diversity.-John Banville

One of The Chicago Tribune's Best Reads of 2011.

One of Dublin's most powerful men meets a violent end--and an acknowledged master of crime fiction delivers his most gripping novel yet.

On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell--known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick--is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite.

Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Fran oise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Further, Sinclair has been seeing Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe, and an unlikely romance is blossoming between the two. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark web of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster.

Tightly plotted and gorgeously written, A Death in Summer proves to the brilliant but sometimes reckless Quirke that in a city where old money and the right bloodlines rule, he is by no means safe from mortal danger.

Even the Dead---Benjamin Black's seventh novel featuring the endlessly fascinating Quirke---is a story of surpassing intensity and surprising beauty.

A car crashes into a tree in central Dublin and bursts into flames. The police assume the driver's death was either an accident or a suicide, but Quirke believes otherwise. Then his daughter Phoebe gets a mysterious visit from an acquaintance, who later disappears. Phoebe asks her father for help, and Quirke in turn seeks the assistance of his old friend Inspector Hackett. Before long the two men find themselves untangling a twisted string of events that takes them deep into a shadowy world where one of the city's most powerful men uses the cover of politics and religion to make obscene profits.

When you're done binge-watching The Crown, pick up this multifaceted wartime thriller.
--Kirkus Reviews

As London endures nightly German bombings, Britain's secret service whisks the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret from England, seeking safety for the young royals on an old estate in Ireland.

Ahead of the German Blitz during World War II, English parents from every social class sent their children to the countryside for safety, displacing more than three million young offspring. In The Secret Guests, the British royal family takes this evacuation a step further, secretly moving the princesses to the estate of the Duke of Edenmore in neutral Ireland.

A female English secret agent, Miss Celia Nashe, and a young Irish detective, Garda Strafford, are assigned to watch over Ellen and Mary at Clonmillis Hall. But the Irish stable hand, the housemaid, the formidable housekeeper, the Duke himself, and other Irish townspeople, some of whom lost family to English gunshots during the War of Independence, go freely about their business in and around the great house. Soon suspicions about the guests' true identities percolate, a dangerous boredom sets in for the princesses, and, within and without Clonmillis acreage, passions as well as stakes rise.

Benjamin Black, who has good information that the princesses were indeed in Ireland for a time during the Blitz, draws readers into a novel as fascinating as the nascent career of Miss Nashe, as tender as the homesickness of the sisters, as intriguing as Irish-English relations during WWII, and as suspenseful and ultimately action-packed as war itself.

When renowned actor Alexander Cleave was a boy living in a large house with his widowed mother and various itinerant lodgers, he encountered a strikingly vivid ghost of his father. Now that he's fifty and has returned to his boyhood home to recover from a nervous breakdown on stage, he is not surprised to find the place still haunted. He is surprised, however, at the presence of two new lodgers who have covertly settled into his old roost. And he is soon overwhelmed by how they, coupled with an onslaught of disturbing memories, compel him to confront the clutter that has become his life: ruined career, tenuous marriage, and troubled relationship with an estranged daughter destined for doom.

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST MYSTERIES OF THE YEAR BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

The latest Quirke case opens in Dublin at a moment when newspapers are censored, social conventions are strictly defined, and appalling crimes are hushed up. Why? Because in 1950s Ireland, the Catholic Church controls the lives of nearly everyone. But when Quirke's daughter, Phoebe, loses her close friend Jimmy Minor to murder, Quirke can no longer play by the church's rules. Along with Inspector Hackett, his sometime partner, Quirke learns just how far the church and its supporters will go to protect their own interests.

In Holy Orders, Benjamin Black's inimitable creation, the endlessly curious Quirke brings a pathologist's unique understanding of death to unlock the most dangerous of secrets.

Propulsive... [Vengeance] will keep you turning pages.--The Los Angeles Times

It's a fine day for a sail, and Victor Delahaye, one of Ireland's most successful businessmen, takes his boat far out to sea--then kills himself in front of his partner's son. This mysterious death immediately engages the attention of Detective Inspector Hackett and his sometime partner, Quirke, consultant pathologist. The stakes are high, and Hackett and Quirke must proceed with caution as they question Mona Delahaye, the dead man's young and very beautiful wife; James and Jonas Delahaye, his identical twin sons; and Jack Clancy, his ambitious, womanizing partner. When a second--and even more shocking--death occurs, it becomes clear that a terrible secret threatens to destroy the lives and reputations of Dublin's elite, in this novel from Benjamin Black.

Now those lies have been unraveled by a mysterious young woman whom Vander calls Miss Nemesis. They are to meet in Turin, a city best known for its enigmatic shroud. Is her purpose to destroy Vander or to save him--or simply to show him what lies beneath the shroud in which he has wrapped his life?

Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe returns in award-winning author John Banville's Marlowe--originally published as The Black-Eyed Blonde under the pen name Benjamin Black--the basis for the major motion picture starring Liam Neeson as the iconic detective.

Somewhere Raymond Chandler is smiling . . . I loved this book. It was like having an old friend, one you assumed was dead, walk into the room.
--Stephen King

It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving.

The streets of Bay City, California, in the early 1950s are as mean as they get. Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and the private eye business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: blond, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover.

Almost immediately, Marlowe discovers that the man's disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City's richest and most ruthless families--and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune.

It's vintage L.A., toots: The hot summer, rain on the asphalt, the woman with the lipstick, cigarette ash and alienation, V8 coupes, tough guys, snub-nosed pistols, the ice melting in the bourbon . . . . The results are Chandleresque, sure, but you can see Banville's sense of fun.
--The Washington Post