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A Novel
A masterful, enthralling new novel from the Booker Prize winner.
Everything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder me... .
1899. As the new century approaches, struggling English writer Evelyn Dolman—a hack, by his own description—marries Laura Rensselaer, daughter of an American oil tycoon. Evelyn anticipates that he and Laura will inherit a substantial fortune and lead a comfortable, settled life. But his hopes are dashed when a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, just before the patriarch's death, leads to her disinheritance.
The unhappy newlyweds travel to Venice to celebrate the New Year at the Palazzo Dioscuri, ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo. From their first moments in the mist-blanketed floating city, otherworldly occurrences begin to accumulate. Evelyn's already jangled nerves fray further. Where has Laura disappeared to? How to explain the increasingly sinister circumstances closing around him? Could he be losing his mind?
Venetian Vespers is a haunting, atmospheric noir from one of the most sophisticated stylists of our time.
"Dark, twisty, and consistently smart: vintage Banville." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
BookPage (starred review)
"Celebrated and virtuoso novelist Banville entwines his gift for historical crime fiction with his most cunning literary artistry in this fever-dream of a tale...Banville is at his Jamesian finest in this beguiling novel of diabolical gambits." —Booklist (starred review)
"An English writer and his secretive bride make a fateful visit to Italy in Banville's eerie latest...Will linger in readers' minds...He keeps the reader guessing." —Publishers Weekly
"An intricate puzzle investigating the erotic yet toxic relationship between a perfidious woman and her susceptible victim." —Library Journal
This information about Venetian Vespers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo © Jerry Bauer
John Banville, the author of seventeen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He lives in Dublin.
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