The Book of Evidence

Description

Freddie Montgomery has committed two crimes. He stole a small Dutch master from a wealthy family friend, and he murdered a chambermaid who caught him in the act. He has little to say about the dead girl. He killed her, he says, because he was physically capable of doing so. It made perfect sense to smash her head in with a hammer. What he cannot understand, and would desperately like to know, is why he was so moved by an unattributed portrait of a middle-aged woman that he felt compelled to steal it . . .

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fifteen novels. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other works include 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, Ghosts, Athena, The Untouchable, Eclipse, Shroud and The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. He was recently awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Dublin.

Remarkable. . . If all crime novels were like this one, there would no longer be the need for a genre -- Ruth Rendell The Book of Evidence is a major work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within. Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift of seeing people's souls -- Don DeLillo Banville has excelled himself in a flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita * Observer * One of the most important writers now at work in English - a key thinker, in fact, in fiction * London Review of Books *