A man attempts to escape a recent loss while confronting a trauma from a long lost summer, in John Banville’s haunting and evocative novel

The Book of Evidence
Written by John Banville
- Shortlisted
- The Booker Prize 1989
- Published by Secker & Warburg
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John Banville’s novel is the compelling confession of an unlikely killer. To what extent is this darkly poetic admission of guilt actually ‘true’?
The first-person prison testimony of Freddie Montgomery - convicted for the ghastly and seemingly motiveless kidnap and murder of a young woman. Trying to make sense of the crime that destroys life - and the career of the friend who unwittingly harbours him - Freddie’s monologue is also an attempt to come to terms with forty years of aimless drifting and dissolution, and to find some glimpse of order in an apparently random world.
John Banville
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland. His novel The Sea won the Booker Prize in 2005
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