The Sea cover art

The Sea

 Preview

Audible Standard 1-month free trial

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo + applicable tax after 30-day trial. Cancel Anytime
Try for $0.00
More purchase options

The Sea

Written by: John Banville
Narrated by: John Lee
Try for $0.00

$8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $20.06

Buy Now for $20.06

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. Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Marriage Heartfelt Grief

You may also enjoy...
Talking Classics cover art
Talking Classics Written by: Mary Beard
Snow cover art
Snow Written by: John Banville
Prophet Song cover art
Prophet Song Written by: Paul Lynch
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1

What the critics say

“Remarkable. . . . The power and strangeness and piercing beauty of [The Sea is] a wonder.” —The Washington Post Book World

“With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov. . . . The Sea [is] his best novel so far.” —The Sunday Telegraph
“A gem. . . . [The sea] is a presence on every page, its ceaseless undulations echoing constantly in the cadences of the prose. This novel shouldn't simply be read. It needs to be heard, for its sound is intoxicating. . . . A winning work of art.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“The Sea offers an extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory. . . . Undeniably brilliant.” —USA Today
All stars
Most Relevant
love the way this author uses words,that in itself makes this book worth reading. his understanding of loss is personal, and the ramblings in his brain i found vert enjoyable

overwhelming

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The story MrBanville tells will become a modern classic if it isn’t already. In the company of Doerr and others, the emotion in the writing carries you, as would a cataract, along to what you know must be the conclusion withou losing any of the impact because you anticipated its course.

Brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I gave up 5 hours into the story, the main character was profoundly unlikeable and the descriptions so long-winded, that I lost the thread of the story. One of the few books I've given up on.

Just terrible

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.