Irish Fiction

Sam Baneham's highly original, satiric Irish novel, The Cloud of Desolation (1982) creates through memorable story and singular language a technocratic dystopia. Irrational people, as Baneham clearly shows, may yet bring about the Biblical 'day ... of wrath, a day of desolation,... a day of clouds and thick darkness'. Although written almost three decades ago, its fear of all-out nuclear war remains all too pertinent to the twenty-first century. Baneham's parable of a possible City of the Future warns against unleashing the Bomb's Cloud of Destruction that inevitably must become a Cloud of Desolation.

In a small town in 1950s Ireland a fifteen-year-old boy has illicit meetings with a thirty-five-year-old woman - in the back of her car on sunny mornings, and in a rundown cottage in the country on rain-soaked afternoons. Unsure why she has chosen him, he becomes obsessed and tormented by this first love.

Adultery is always put in terms of thieving. Oliver Orme is a painter who has abandoned his art. His days are now haunted by loss: loss of desire; of artistic vision; of the people he has loved. And only now does he realize that those around him understand him more than he does himself.

Mrs Osmond is a masterly novel of betrayal, corruption and moral ambiguity, from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea.

This is the book John Banville was born to write' Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman

Opens with a shipwreck, leaving a party of sightseers temporarily marooned on an island. The stranded castaways make their way towards the refuge of the isle's reclusive savant; but the big isolated house which is home to Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic assistant, Licht, is also home to another, unnamed presence.

The darkly compelling confession of an improbable murderer, shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize.

This is one of the most startling of the century's varied achievements in Irish writing' Seamus Deane

Volume Two of the Revolutions Trilogy

Volume One of the Revolutions Trilogy

From the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea.