Review

“This is one of the most startling of the century's varied achievements in Irish writing.”

—Seamus Deane

"John Banville is one of the greatest masters of the English language.”

—The Scotsman

"Birchwood represents a watershed in contemporary Irish writing..”

—Colm Toibin

Product Description

An early classic from the Man Booker-prize winning author of The Sea.

I am therefore I think. So starts John Banville’s 1973 novel Birchwood, a novel that centers around Gabriel Godkin and his return to his dilapidated family estate. After years away, Gabriel returns to a house filled with memories and despair. Delving deep into family secrets—a cold father, a tortured mother, an insane grandmother—Gabriel also recalls his first encounters with love and loss. At once a novel of a family, of isolation, and of a blighted Ireland, Birchwood is a remarkable and complex story about the end of innocence for one boy and his country, told in the brilliantly styled prose of one of our most essential writers.