My first encounter with John Banville’s literature was through his Booker Prize winning novel The Sea (2005). And I know for sure that I will have to read many more of his books in the years to come.

The way Banville uses language is amazing, and extremely challenging for one not having English as her first language. But the text, full of small sentences of poetry, makes the effort worthwhile & advisable.
In the story of the narrator, past and present are fused, like waves – coming and going in the mind of the narrator. Mourning the death of his wife in the town where he spent his childhood holidays, Max Morden goes in and out of different realities, and Banville is by this constant motion composing a complex life story.
But the story is just a part of this novel; even more stunning is the language it is written in, the way he as an author approaches wordless sensations. Like the indescribable feeling of one’s first kiss: “I had a sense of a general, large, soft settling, as of a sheet unfurling and falling on a bed, or a tent collapsing into the cushion of its own air” (161) the atmosphere seems almost painted on the pages…