Books in the Frames series

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

'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.

'A beautiful, beguiling book full of resonances that continue to sound long after you've turned the final page. Its imagining is magical, its execution dazzlingly skilful.' Sunday Tribune Ghosts opens with a shipwreck, leaving a party of sightseers temporarily marooned on an island. The stranded castaways make their way towards the big isolated house which is home to the reclusive Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic assistant, Licht, but it is also home to another, unnamed presence . . . Onto this seemingly haunted island, where a strange singing hangs in the air, John Banville drops an intriguing cast of characters - including a murderer - and weaves a tale where the details are clear but the conclusion polymorphous - shifting appearances, transformations and thwarted assumptions make this world of uneasy calm utterly enthralling.