Athena

Guilt-plagued art historian Morrow, our narrator, is at a loose end when, separately, two people beckon him up the stairs of an empty and decrepit Dublin house. One offers work of a dubious kind; the other offers a sort of love. A novel full of the delicious sense of impending menace, Banvilles sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose will leave the reader longing for more from this consummately skilled novelist.