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The Sea

by John Banville

A seaside return shaped by grief and memory

Award Winner
Regular price $16.89 USD
Regular price $28.15 USD Sale price $16.89 USD
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Awards & Recognition

  • Award recognition

    Booker Prize winner

    The source describes The Sea as a Booker Prize winner.

AlbakiReads Editorial

A seaside return shaped by grief and memory

Max Morden returns to the seaside town where he spent childhood summers after the recent death of his wife. The place also carries memories of the Graces, a prosperous family he met there as a boy, and of his first encounters with love and death. The novel brings Morden’s present bereavement into conversation with those earlier experiences, tracing how the past continues to shape his understanding of himself. Its central concerns are loss, childhood, memory and the lasting imprint of formative experiences.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in novels about grief and bereavement
  • Readers drawn to fiction that explores childhood memories and their influence on adult life
  • Readers seeking literary fiction set in an Irish seaside town

Themes

Grief and mortalityMemory and childhoodLove and lossThe enduring influence of the past

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - An "extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife.

In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.

What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel--among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.
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Customer reviews

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Malaika Taylor

I highly recommend to for anyone looking for inner clarity

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Thomas DiMassa

Great service and fast service

Great shopping experience! The book arrived quickly, was well packaged, and matched the description perfectly. I would definitely shop with you again

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Olivia

Smooth.