Shroud - Softcover

Banville, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330483145 ISBN 13: 9780330483148

Publisher: Pan MacMillan, 2003

Synopsis

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.

‘In beautiful, lucid prose John Banville describes a tragedy so strongly rooted in history and character that, like all real tragedies, it could not happen otherwise’ The Times

About this title

From the Back Cover

“In this mesmerizing novel, taut with intelligence, compassion and wit, Banville has once again worked his extravagant alchemy, transmuting the prose of the familiar world into the poetry of revelation and renewal.”
—Independent on Sunday (London)

“John Banville’s literary powers are so commanding that it feels almost wilful to withold full assent from Shroud, a book almost entirely composed of bursts of amazing prose.”
—The Observer

“Banville is one of the great fictional stylists of our time, a deliberate and deliberative man who picks over his words with the finest tweezers available from the lexicographical pharmacy.”
—The Spectator

“Without being a remotely moralistic writer, he has produced a starkly intense moral parable”
—Sunday Tribune

“Morally gripping as it is, Shroud is still a Banville performance, playing brilliantly with language in the gap between actuality and perception . . . Shroud will not easily be surpassed for combination of wit, moral complexity, and compassion. It is hard to see what more a novel could do”
—Irish Times

“Shroud certainly demonstrates [Banville’s] ability to generate extreme tension and utterly uncanny atmospheres; it also situates him firmly within a great European tradition.”
—The Guardian (London)

“In beautiful, lucid prose John Banville describes a tragedy so strongly rooted in history and character that, like all real tragedies, it could not happen otherwise.”
—The Times (London)

From the Inside Flap

One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton’s Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable narrator of John Banville’s masterful new novel, is very old, recently widowed, and the bearer of a fearsome reputation as a literary dandy and bully. A product of the Old World, he is also an escapee from its conflagrations, with the wounds to prove it. And everything about him is a lie.

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? A splendidly moving exploration of identity, duplicity, and desire, Shroud is Banville’s most rapturous performance to date.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan MacMillan
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0330483145
• ISBN 13: 9780330483148
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416