The Sea
by John Banville
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Reading Club Session: 17 April 2017
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When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Mr and Mrs Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins Myles and Chloe, who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow.
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Questions for discussion
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John Banville
William John Banville (born 8 December 1945), who writes as John Banville and sometimes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. Recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators, Banville is considered to be "one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today."
Banville has received numerous awards in his career. His fourteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award in Letters. He is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Banville's stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".
He has published a number of crime novels as Benjamin Black, most featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in Dublin.
A film adaptation has been shot, with Banville having penned the script. The movie is directed by Stephen Brown and stars Ciarán Hinds (Max Morden), Rufus Sewell (Carlo Grace), Charlotte Rampling (Miss Vavasour), and Natascha McElhone (Connie Grace). The film is produced by Luc Roeg, scored by Andrew Hewitt, with cinematography by John Conroy.
Reviews
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The Guardian review