The Book of Evidence, The Sea: Introduction by Adam Phillips

Two essential novels from one of the most imaginative writers of our time: a Booker Prize winner about the unpredictable power of memory and an unforgettable literary mystery short-listed for the Booker prize.

The Book of Evidence is a brilliantly disturbing portrait of an improbable murderer. Freddie Montgomery is an aimless, eccentric, and highly cultured man whose arrest for the murder of a servant girl prompts him to offer the reader an extended testimony. However, the evidence Freddie offers is not of his innocence, but of his life—of the circumstances that led to and (in his chillingly amoral mind) justified his grisly crime. Hauntingly reminiscent of Camus, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov, The Book of Evidence is among the most darkly compelling novels in international literature.

The Sea follows retired art historian Max Morden to the seaside town where he spent his childhood summers. Max is grieving the loss of his wife, Anna, but returning to the seaside brings back intense memories of the wealthy and mysterious family in whose presence he had first learned about love and loss. Banville’s exploration of the unpredictable power of memory—a force as treacherous as the sea that pulses through the story. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him—is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel.

JOHN BANVILLE, the author of fifteen previous novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the Jame Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.

ADAM PHILLIPS is a psychoanalyst and essayist, whose books include Houdini's Box, Missing Out, and One Way and Another. He is a regular contributor to The London Review of Books and is general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud.