The Blue Guitar

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. A HOUSE AUTHOR: Banville's backlist has netted Vintage more than 300,000 copies in trade paperback. 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