Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

When New York priest Michael Flaherty he hears that his younger brother Gabriel is missing he returns to the island off the coast of Galway that he fled many years before. Plagued by guilt over the drowning of his oldest brother, Flaherty hopes to find his only other brother alive, but first he has to face all the demons he ran away from.

Many years

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One of the first things that strikes the reader upon starting The Sea is the sense of familiarity on encountering its protagonist Max Morden. John Banville’s characters are certainly distinct from one another but occupy the same Venn diagram of self-satisfied, unfulfilled smugness as each other. Their morality is in a constant state of dishabille

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While many book lovers know who John Banville is, quite a lot haven’t read any of his work. The reasons are possibly that Banville has a weighty literary rep that inspires awe and fear in equal measures. My first introduction to him is The Book of Evidence and based on this, his back catalogue beckons.

For a writer of literary fiction, it’s

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