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On Top Shelf
Fresh Pick
TRADWIFE
📚 New Books This Week 📰 Latest News 🎪 Reader Games

Snowbound secrets, shifter wars, family lies, and epic battles β€” September delivers it all.

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Some promises cost you the one you love.

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The Temple of Kronos wants her dead. The Stoneslayer wants her destroyed. Neither will have her.

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A poisoned cousin, a five-year-old's life, and a family with too many secrets.

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Betrayal runs in her blood. Justice runs in his. Together, they burn it all down.

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"ANOTHER WINNER!"
From New York Times
Bestselling Cleo Coyle

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Running from her past, she finds a killer, a protector, and her faith.

The Sea by John Banville

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Also by John Banville:

Even the Dead, January 2026
Trade Paperback
Holy Orders, December 2025
Trade Paperback / e-Book
The Drowned, October 2024
Hardcover / e-Book
Snow, October 2024
Mass Market Paperback / e-Book
The Lock-Up, September 2024
Trade Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
Birchwood, March 2024
Trade Paperback / e-Book
Kepler, February 2024
Trade Paperback / e-Book
Doctor Copernicus, February 2024
Trade Paperback / e-Book
The Lock-Up, June 2023
Hardcover / e-Book
The Singularities, November 2022
Hardcover / e-Book
April in Spain, October 2021
Hardcover / e-Book
Snow, October 2020
Hardcover / e-Book
The Infinities, March 2010
Hardcover
The Silver Swan, April 2008
Hardcover / e-Book
Christine Falls, March 2007
Hardcover / e-Book
The Sea, November 2005
Hardcover
The Sea, November 2005
Hardcover

THE SEA
By: John Banville

Man Booker Prize

Knopf
November 2005
208 pages
ISBN: 0307263118
Hardcover
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Fiction

The author of The Untouchable (β€œcontemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a childβ€”a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twinsβ€”Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionlessβ€”in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the β€œbarely bearable raw immediacy” of his childhood memories.

Interwoven with this story are Morden’s memories of his wife, Annaβ€”of their life together, of her deathβ€”and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him β€œlike a second heart.”

What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novelβ€”among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.

Media Buzz

Diane Rehm Show - NPR - March 29, 2006

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