The Sea cover art

The Sea

The Booker Prize-winning novel

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About this listen

‘A masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected’ Professor John Sutherland, Chair of Judges, Man Booker Prize 2005

The Sea is John Banville's Man Booker prize-winning exploration of memory, childhood and loss.

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Mr and Mrs Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins Myles and Chloe, who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow.

 Coming of Age Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

A novel in which all of his remarkable gifts come together to produce a real work of art, disquieting, beautiful, intelligent, and in the end, surprisingly, offering consolation. (Allan Massie)
You can smell and feel and see his world with extraordinary clarity. It is a work of art, and I’ll bet it will still be read and admired in seventy-five years. (Rick Gekoski)
Poetry seems to come easily to Banville. There is so much to applaud in this book that it deserves more than one reading.
A brilliant, sensuous, discombobulating novel.
All stars
Most relevant
I found me in the Sea and realised the brokenness in all of us, the futility of self help and the glory of faith which shone through in its absense.

Finding me in the Sea

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A glorious way to spend 6.5 hrs. Everything about this audio book is perfect. The source text is rich, sad and vainglorious; the narration perfectly matched.

Stunning

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The unreliable and unlikeable narrator of John Banville’s novel — Max Morden resembles so many of Henry James’s self-absorbed characters and narrators and in more than his name — reveals much about memory, its vital importance (and not simply to the bereaved) but also its subtle interventions in the past. Accordingly, the sadness in the novel comes across freed from the easy sentimentality and nostalgia that can mar stories of loss, in this case the loss of the narrator’s wife and his own childhood. / It says all that needs to be said of Jim Norton’s reading that I thought I was listening to Max and of John Banville that his very foregrounded prose style becomes Max’s.

Intervening in the Past

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The narration of this lovely book flowed over me like the waves of the sea itself narrating it's tale of navigating the waves of love, grief and loss

Living Our Dying - a Work in Progress

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John Banville is incredible - I loved other books, this one did not work for me on Audible. And I just could not get into it. Maybe I'll give it a go in hard copy.

Loved other J Banville books...

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