The Sea

Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman returns to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child--a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without his recently deceased wife. It is also a return to the place where he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time and his memories of the past.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. The author of thirteen previous novels, he has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.