Author(s): John Banville

Fiction

John Banville's "Ancient Light" is a story of obsessive young love and the power of grief. 'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' 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. Half a century later, actor Alexander Cleave - grieving for the recent loss of his daughter - recalls these trysts, trying to make sense of the boy he was and of the needs and frailties of the human heart. Praise for "Ancient Light": "Startlingly brilliant. Terrific - full of sadness and yearning". ("Sunday Telegraph"). "Dazzling ...captures a long-lost adolescent world of passion and desire". ("Independent"). "Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death". ("Financial Times").