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  • Published: 5 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670920631
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Ancient Light




A story of obsessive young love and the power of grief - the best novel yet from the Booker Prize winning author of The Sea

'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.'

Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back of his lover's car on sunny mornings and rain-soaked afternoons. And with these early memories comes something sharper and much darker - the more recent recollection of the actor's own daughter's suicide ten years before.

Ancient Light is the story of a life rendered brilliantly vivid: the obsession and selfishness of young love and the terrifying shock of grief. It is a dazzling novel, funny, utterly pleasurable and devastatingly moving in the same moment.

  • Published: 5 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670920631
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

About the author

John Banville

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland in 1945. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other books are Nightspawn; Birchwood; Doctor Copernicus, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976; Kepler, which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1981; The Newton Letter, which was filmed for Channel 4; Mefisto and The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize and won the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Award. John Banville is literary editor of the Irish Times and lives in London with his wife and two sons.

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