Venetian Vespers
'Wickedly entertaining' IRISH TIMES
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A SUNDAY TIMES AND TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR, SHORTLISTED FOR THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2025
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SNOW AND THE SEA
Everything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder me. . .
Winter 1899, and strange things are afoot. As the new century approaches, English hack writer Evelyn Dolman marries Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of a wealthy American plutocrat. But in the midst of a rift between Laura and her father, Evelyn's plans for a substantial inheritance look to be dashed.
Arriving in Venice for their belated honeymoon at Palazzo Dioscuri - the ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo - the couple are met by a series of seemingly
otherworldly occurrences, which exacerbate Evelyn's already frayed nerves. Is it just the sea mist blanketing the floating city, or is he really losing his mind?
'A marvellous and rewarding novelist . . . He is a magician, really.' THE SCOTSMAN
'Banville has a grim gift of seeing people's souls.' DON DeLILLO
'The most eminent innovator in Irish fiction of the last 50 years.' IRISH TIMES
'One of my favourite writers alive.' REBECCA F. KUANG
'Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance.' NEW YORK TIMES
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An English writer and his secretive bride make a fateful visit to Italy in Banville's eerie latest (after The Drowned). By the time Evelyn Dolman meets American heiress Laura Rensselaer in 1899, he has abandoned his dreams of becoming a "lord of language," and instead made a career writing cheap travel guides. After he proposes to Evelyn, they have sex and she proves to be "no stranger to the night-world where Eros reigns." Her oil baron father, Willard, dies shortly after the wedding, and Laura, refusing to explain why he left her little of his fortune, insists on a belated winter honeymoon in Venice. Dolman, who speaks no Italian, is miserable from the cold and from Laura's refusal to have sex with him since their first and only time. She urges him to visit a café popular with tourists, where he meets a stranger named Freddie FitzHerbert, who claims to be his former schoolmate, and Freddie's alluring sister, Francesca. Dolman returns home drunk and rapes Laura, then wakes to find that she's vanished. As the Italian police organize a search, Dolman, unworried for Laura's safety, begins an affair with Francesca. Banville sustains a sinister atmosphere in the strange and subtle narrative, and he keeps the reader guessing as to what degree Evelyn is the victim of others' machinations. This ambiguous tale will linger in readers' minds.
