Birchwood

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many highly acclaimed and prize-winning novels including The Sea, which won the 2005 Booker Prize, and the Revolutions, Frames, and Cleave trilogies. He has been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize and a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

Birchwood represents a watershed in contemporary Irish writing: it is a novel in which history becomes a rich black comedy full of land agitation and Gothic characters; and a sense of bewilderment at the nature of the universe fills its pages