The Blue Guitar

From the Booker Prize–winning author of The Sea comes a “beautiful, heartbreaking” novel (The Washington Post) about a painter and the intricacies of artistic creation, theft, and the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves. Oliver Otway Orme—a man equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating—is a painter of some renown, and a petty thief who has never been caught … until now. Unfortunately, the purloined possession in question is the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend. Fearing the consequences, Olly has fled—not only from his mistress, his home, and his wife, but from the very impulse to paint, and from his own demons. He sequesters himself in the house where he was born, and thus, he sets about trying to uncover the answer to how and why things have turned out as they did. A witty and trenchant novel, The Blue Guitar shows Man Booker Prize–winning author John Banville at the peak of his powers. UK PUBLICATION: Penguin UK will publish their edition on the fall list, also. THE BOOK ITSELF: 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 Author Bio: 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