The Sea – John Banville (1st Edition, Picador, 2005)

This Picador first edition (2005) of John Banville's The Sea is of interest to collectors of John Banville, Man Booker Prize winners, and first editions of contemporary Irish fiction.

About: A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. The jacket carries the beautiful atmospheric seascape design - pale blues and greys fading to a dark horizon - and is bright and clean with only light wear to the spine ends and a small bump to the top right corner of the front board. The interior is crisp and entirely unmarked throughout. A very well-preserved copy of the first edition of Banville's Booker Prize-winning novel.

Details:

• Title: The Sea
• Author: John Banville
• Publisher: Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd, London
• Publication Date: 2005
• Edition: First Edition
• Award: Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2005
• Dedication: To Colm, Douglas, Ellen, Alice
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

Synopsis: Picador first edition of Banville's Man Booker Prize-winning novel - a luminous, elegiac meditation on memory, grief, and the past, set against the backdrop of an Irish seaside town. One of the most celebrated Irish novels of the 21st century.

Review: John Banville's The Sea won the Man Booker Prize in 2005, confirming his status as one of the great prose stylists in the English language. The novel follows Max Morden, a recently widowed art historian who returns to the seaside village of his childhood, where memories of a long-ago summer - and a family who changed his life - begin to surface. Banville's prose is precise, sensuous, and deeply melancholic, and The Sea is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Praised by The Times, Don DeLillo, the Daily Telegraph, and the Spectator.