Audiobooks by John Banville

Spaziergänge durch Dublin (Ungekürzt) Audiobook

Eine Ode an die Stadt Dublin. Ein sehr persönlicher Dublin-Stadtführer und zugleich eine autobiographische Reise des großen irischen Schriftstellers und Man Booker Prize-Trägers John Banville an ganz besondere Orte in der Sehnsuchtsstadt seiner Kindheit. Geboren und aufgewachsen in Wexford durfte John Banville als Kind an seinem Geburtstag die exzentrische Lieblingstante in Dublin besuchen - das für ihn so zu einem Ort der Verheißungen wurde. Nachdem er als Erwachsener dorthin gezogen war, sah Banville Dublin zwar mit realistischeren Augen, und doch blieb die Faszination, die die Stadt schon auf den Siebenjährigen ausgeübt hatte. In diesem Hörbuch führt Banville den Hörer zu bekannten und weniger bekannten Plätzen. Dabei verwebt er die Erinnerungen, die sich an bestimmte Straßen und Gebäude knüpfen, mit einer großen Kenntnis des Orts und seiner Geschichte. Das Ergebnis ist eine wunderbar eigenwillige Tour durch Dublin; eine zärtliche und imposante Ode an die Stadt und eine Fundgrube für alle Dublin-Reisenden. Ein Buch, genauso vielschichtig, reich, geistreich und überraschend wie die Romane des großen irischen Romanciers und Krimiautors. Das aus 'The Voice of Germany' bekannte Blues- und Folk-Duo 'Liam Blaney & Ben Heuer' steuern als exklusive Originalaufnahme den Irish Folk Song 'Tied my Toes to the Bed' zur Abrundung des Hör-Erlebnisses bei.

John Banville (Author), Reinhard Kuhnert (Narrator)

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Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir

From the internationally acclaimed and Man Booker prize-winning author of The Sea and the Benjamin Black mysteries-a vividly evocative memoir that unfolds around the author's recollections, experience, and imaginings of Dublin. As much about the life of the city as it is about a life lived, sometimes, in the city, John Banville's "quasi-memoir" is as layered, emotionally rich, witty, and unexpected as any of his novels. Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived. And though, when he came of age and took up residence there, and the city became a frequent backdrop for his dissatisfactions (not playing an identifiable role in his work until the Quirke mystery series, penned as Benjamin Black), it remained in some part of his memory as fascinating as it had been to his seven-year-old self. And as he guides us around the city, delighting in its cultural, architectural, political, and social history, he interweaves the memories that are attached to particular places and moments. The result is both a wonderfully idiosyncratic tour of Dublin, and a tender yet powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man.

John Banville (Author), John Lee (Narrator)

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Mrs. Osmond

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, a dazzling and audacious new novel that extends the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, into unexpected territory. Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naïve girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and-as Isabel finds out too late-cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate. On a trip to England to visit her cousin Ralph Touchett on his deathbed, Isabel is offered a chance to free herself from the marriage, but nonetheless chooses to return to Italy. Banville follows James's story line to this point, but Mrs. Osmond is thoroughly Banville's own: the narrative inventiveness; the lyrical precision and surprise of his language; the layers of emotional and psychological intensity; the subtle, dark humor. And when Isabel arrives in Italy-along with someone else!-the novel takes off in directions that James himself would be thrilled to follow.

John Banville (Author), Amy Finegan (Narrator)

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Mrs Osmond

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Mrs Osmond by John Banville, read by Amy Finegan. 'What was freedom, she thought, other than the right to exercise one's choices?' Isabel Osmond, a spirited, intelligent young heiress, flees to London after being betrayed by her husband, to be with her beloved cousin Ralph on his deathbed. After a sombre, silent existence at her husband's Roman palazzo, Isabel's daring escape to London reawakens her youthful quest for freedom and independence, as old suitors resurface and loyal friends remind her of happier times. But soon Isabel must decide whether to return to Rome to face up to the web of deceit in which she has become entangled, or to strike out on her own once more.

John Banville (Author), Amy Finegan (Narrator)

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The Blue Guitar: A novel

TARGET CONSUMER: For readers of Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Flanagan, Roddy Doyle From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, a new novel--at once trenchant, witty, and shattering--about the intricacies of artistic creation and theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves. Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme, is a painter of some renown, and a petty thief who does not steal for profit and has never before been caught. But he's pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well lately. Having recognized the "man-killing crevasse" that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it--any attempt to make what he sees his own--he's stopped painting. And his last purloined possession--the last time he felt the "secret sliver of bliss" in thievery--has been discovered. The fact that it was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend, has compelled him to run away: from his mistress, his home, his wife, from whatever remains of his impulse to paint and from the tragedy that haunts him, and to sequester himself in the house where he was born, trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have. Excavating memories of family, of places he's called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him ("no matter what else is going on, one of my eyes is always swiveling toward the world beyond") Ollie reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself. A MODERN MASTER: A former Man Booker Prize winner (among a host of other awards), critically acclaimed and commercially adored, John Banville is essential reading for any fan of contemporary Irish and English literature. Banville's backlist has netted Vintage more than 300,000 copies in trade paperback. This is classic John Banville; a tense, fraught, and frequently comic mediation on the intricacies of human relations, on art, and especially, on the corrosive nature of jealousy. Praise for John Banville: "Banville is, without question, one of the great living masters of English-language prose." --Los Angeles Times "A ray of hope for the future of fiction." --The New Statesman (London) "With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov ... His prose is sublime." --The Sunday Telegraph (London) "Magnificent.... Treacherously smart and haunting." --The Boston Globe "An extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory.... Undeniably brilliant." --USA Today "The Book of Evidence is a major new work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within." --Don DeLillo "Banville is the heir to Proust, via Nabokov.... Beautiful." --The Daily Beast John Banville, the author of sixteen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin. Residence: Dublin, Ireland Hometown: Dublin, Ireland Author Site: http://www.john-banville.com/ Social: https://www.facebook.com/JohnBanvilleAuthor

John Banville (Author), Gerry O'Brien (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Blue Guitar

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of The Blue Guitar by John Banville, read by Gerry O'Brien. Adultery is always put in terms of thieving. But we were happy together, simply happy. 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. Set in a re-imagined Ireland, The Blue Guitar reveals a life haunted by the desire to possess and always aware of the frailty of the human heart.

John Banville (Author), Gerry O'brien (Narrator)

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Ancient Light

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant, profoundly moving new novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: a meditation on love and loss, and on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives. Is there any difference between memory and invention? That is the question that fuels this stunning novel, written with the depth of character, the clarifying lyricism and the sly humor that have marked all of John Banville's extraordinary works. And it is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave, an actor in the twilight of his career and of his life, as he plumbs the memories of his first-and perhaps only-love (he, fifteen years old, the woman more than twice his age, the mother of his best friend; the situation impossible, thrilling, devouring and finally devastating) . . . and of his daughter, lost to a kind of madness of mind and heart that Cleave can only fail to understand. When his dormant acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role portraying a man who may not be who he says he is, his young leading lady-famous and fragile-unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see with aching clarity the "chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done." Ancient Light is a profoundly moving meditation on love and loss, on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives, on how invention shapes memory and memory shapes the man. It is a book of spellbinding power and pathos from one of the greatest masters of prose at work today.

John Banville (Author), Robin Sachs (Narrator)

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The Infinities

Old Adam Godley's time on earth is drawing to an end, and as his wife and children gather at the family home, little do they realize that they are not the only ones who have come to observe the spectacle. The mischievous Greek gods, too, have come; as tensions fray and desire bubbles over, their spying soon becomes intrusion becomes intervention, until the mortals' lives - right before their eyes - seem to be changing faster than they can cope with. Overflowing with bawdy humour, John Banville has allowed his twinkling eye to rove through memories of the past and relationships of the present in this moving family drama. Read by Julian Rhind-Tutt, The Infinities is both a salacious delight and a penetrating exploration of the terrifying, wonderful, immutable plight of being human.

John Banville (Author), Julian Rhind-Tutt (Narrator)

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The Infinities

On a languid midsummer's day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician, is dying. His family gathers at his bedside: his son, young Adam, struggling to maintain his marriage to a radiantly beautiful actress; his nineteen-year-old daughter, Petra, filled with voices and visions as she waits for the inevitable; their mother, Ursula, whose relations with the Godley children are strained at best; and Petra's young man, very likely more interested in the father than the daughter, who has arrived for a superbly ill-timed visit. But the Godley family is not alone in their vigil. Around them hovers a family of mischievous immortals, among them, Zeus, who has his eye on young Adam's wife; Pan, who has taken the doughy, perspiring form of an old unwelcome acquaintance; and Hermes, who is the genial and omniscient narrator: We too are petty and vindictive, he tells us, just like you, when we are put to it. As old Adam's days on earth run down, these unearthly beings start to stir up trouble, to sometimes wildly unintended effect. . . . Blissfully inventive and playful, rich in psychological insight and sensual detail, The Infinities is at once a gloriously earthy romp and a wise look at the terrible, wonderful plight of being human, a dazzling novel from one of the most widely admired and acclaimed writers at work today.

John Banville (Author), Julian Rhind-Tutt (Narrator)

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The Sea

'A masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected' Professor John Sutherland, Chair of Judges, Man Booker Prize 2005 The Sea is John Banville's Man Booker prize-winning exploration of memory, childhood and loss. 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.

John Banville (Author), Jim Norton (Narrator)

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The Sea

The author of The Untouchable ("contemporary fiction gets no better than this"-Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back 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 her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins-Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless-in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the "barely bearable raw immediacy" of his childhood memories. Interwoven with this story are Morden's memories of his wife, Anna-of their life together, of her death-and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him "like a second heart." What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel-among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.

John Banville (Author), John Lee (Narrator)

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