At once a literary thriller and a sumptuously perverse love story, John Banville's latest novel is a tour de force of the narrative imagination. Banville's narrator calls himself "Morrow"--the name a fiction designed to cover a past of unspeakable violence. He knows a great deal about seventeenth-century Flemish art, which makes him indispensable to the baroque lowlifes who want him to authenticate some suspicious paintings stashed in a derelict house in Dublin.
While thus engaged, Morrow meets "A," a woman who seems to have stepped out of one of those antique canvases. In time she will become Morrow's mistress and nemesis, his anguish and addiction--and his tutor in all the destructive impulses he thought he had left behind. Athena is a masterpiece of the seductive and the sinister by a writer who can chill and dazzle us all at once.
Editorial Reviews
"A strange and dreamlike book....Amusing, brilliant, refined...Banville has a breathtaking style." --Boston Globe
"Sustained by prose of idiosyncratic and appalling charm....Athena is as grotesque as a portrait by Arcimboldo and every bit as beautiful." --The New York Times Book Review
"A thriller with a uniquely rich accompaniment of imagery...by Ireland's master of the exquisite and uncanny, whose brilliant use of prose narration places him in a league with Joyce and Beckett." --San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1976), the Guardian Fiction Prize (1981), the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award (1989), and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1997). He has been both shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1989) and awarded the Man Booker Prize (2005) as well as nominated for the Man Booker International Prize (2007). Other awards include the Franz Kafka Prize (2011), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2013), and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (2014). He lives in Dublin.
