Long Lankin: Stories

Long Lankin: Stories by John Banville Page A

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Authors: John Banville
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armies careening across Europe and order assassins into the bedchambers of their enemies. And in a remote corner of Poland, a modest canon is practicing medicine and studying the heavens, preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe. This astonishing work offers a vivid portrait of a man of painful reticence, haunted by a malevolent brother and baffled by the conspiracies that rage around him and his ideas. For in a world that is equal parts splendor and barbarism, an obscure cleric who seeks “the secret music of the universe” poses a most devastating threat.
Fiction/Literature
     
ECLIPSE
     
When renowned stage actor Alexander Cleave was a boy living in a large house with his widowed mother and various itinerant lodgers, he encountered a strikingly vivid ghost of his father. Now that he’s fifty and has returned to his boyhood home to recover from a nervous breakdown suffered mid-performance, he is not surprised to find the place still haunted. He is surprised, however, by the presence of two new lodgers who have covertly settled into his old roost. And he is soon overwhelmed by how they, coupled with an onslaught of disturbing memories, compel him to confront the clutter that has become his life: ruined career, tenuous marriage, and troubled relationship with an estranged daughter.
Fiction/Literature
     
GHOSTS
     
On an unnamed island, a dayboat runs aground, forcing its group of shaken travelers to wade ashore. There they encounter a reclusive art historian and his assistant. But is this meeting truly an accident? If so, why does one of the castaways appear to know the reclusive scholar—and why is the latter so afraid of him? And who is the stranger who moves among them, as omnipresent as a little god, as haunted as a fleeting murderer, observing their actions with longing, dread, and sinister amusement?
Fiction/Literature
     
SHROUD
     
Axel Vander is very old, recently widowed, and the bearer of a fearsome reputation as a literary dandy and bully. A product of the Old World, he is also an escapee from its conflagrations, with the wounds to prove it. And everything about him is a lie. Now those lies have been unraveled by a mysterious young woman whom Vander calls “Miss Nemesis.” Is her purpose to destroy Vander or save him—or simply to show him what lies beneath the shroud in which he has wrapped his life?
Fiction/Literature
     
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