'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.'
Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back of his lover's car on sunny mornings and rain-soaked afternoons. And with these early memories comes something sharper and much darker - the more recent recollection of the actor's own daughter's suicide ten years before.
Ancient Light is the story of a life rendered brilliantly vivid: the obsession and selfishness of young love and the terrifying shock of grief. It is a dazzling novel, funny, utterly pleasurable and devastatingly moving in the same moment.
'Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death' Financial Times
'Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence. A luminous, breathtaking work' Independent on Sunday
'Startlingly brilliant. Terrific - full of sadness and yearning' Sunday Telegraph
| ISBN: | 9780241986455 |
| Publication date: | 6th June 2019 |
| Author: | John Banville |
| Publisher: | Penguin Books an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 244 pages |
| Series: | Penguin Essentials |
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Other Genres: | |
| Recommendations: |
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'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.'
Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back of his lover's car on sunny mornings and rain-soaked afternoons. And with these early memories comes something sharper and much darker - the more recent recollection of the actor's own daughter's suicide ten years before.
Ancient Light is the story of a life rendered brilliantly vivid: the obsession and selfishness of young love and the terrifying shock of grief. It is a dazzling novel, funny, utterly pleasurable and devastatingly moving in the same moment.
'Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death' Financial Times
'Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence. A luminous, breathtaking work' Independent on Sunday
'Startlingly brilliant. Terrific - full of sadness and yearning' Sunday Telegraph
Ancient Light features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Family Drama, eBooks of the Month, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations
Ancient Light is available in Paperback, Ebook, Hardback
Ancient Light was written by John Banville and published by Penguin Books an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd
Ancient Light has 244 pages
Yes it is part of Penguin Essentials series
£15.29