Ancient Light,John Banville- 9780241955406

Penguin Books Ltd

John Banville's Ancient Light is a story of obsessive young love and the power of grief\n\n'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.'\n\nIn a small town in 1950s Ireland a fifteen-year-old boy has illicit meetings with a thirty-five-year-old woman - in the back of her car on sunny mornings, and in a rundown cottage in the country on rain-soaked afternoons. Unsure why she has chosen him, he becomes obsessed and tormented by this first love. Half a century later, actor Alexander Cleave - grieving for the recent loss of his daughter - recalls these trysts, trying to make sense of the boy he was and of the needs and frailties of the human heart.\n\nPraise for Ancient Light:\n\n'Startlingly brilliant. Terrific - full of sadness and yearning' Sunday Telegraph\n\n'Dazzling . . . captures a long-lost adolescent world of passion and desire', Independent\n\n'Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on.