The Singularities

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From the Booker Prize-winning John Banville comes a playful, multilayered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory.

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. There is a new family living 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.

Reviews

'John Banville is a marvellous and rewarding novelist . . . He is a magician, really.'- Allan Massie, The Scotsman


'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.' - Tom Ball, The Times


'This novel is essence of Banville . . . There is the usual sumptuous style . . . He retains a brilliant grasp of imagery . . . There is a welcome sense of playfulness . . . Banville is clearly having a lot of fun.' - John Self, Daily Telegraph


'Gorgeously written and superbly choreographed.' - Kevin Power, Irish Independent


'A beguiling book . . . Astonishingly lovely.'- Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

Author Bio

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.