Athena

Description

`Sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose' Sunday TimesAthena is the third in the Frames Trilogy, a set of loosely connected novels by the Booker Prize-winning author, John Banville. Morrow - a clerkish, middle-aged type encumbered with a chain-smoking dying aunt and a considerable talent for wallowing - is at a loose end when, on two separate occasions, he is beckoned up the stairs of an empty Dublin house. The first is an offer of dubious work, and Morrow soon becomes caught up in a conspiracy to authenticate a series of fake paintings. The second, possibly even odder, is an offer of a love - of a sort. Written in typically luminous prose and featuring a rich cast of characters, Athena is a paean to art, painting, and love, in all its mercurial richness.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other books are Nightspawn , Birchwood, Doctor Copernicus (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976), Kepler (which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1981), The Newton Letter (which was filmed for Channel 4), Mefisto, The Book of Evidence (shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize and winner of the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Award), Ghosts, The Untouchable, Eclipse , Shroud and the Booker Prize-winning The Sea. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

One of the most profoundly intelligent, introspective novels of recent years, questioning the perceptions of author, narrator, reader and critic. Good Book Guide The consummately achieved and entrancing creation of a master of language: in the fullest sense a work of art. Scotsman Athena is a love letter to Morrow's passions, to love, to art and to the paintings he examines: works on classical themes, in which a moment's obsession, lust, loss and magic are preserved for ever. Literary Review