'You can smell and feel and see his world with extraordinary clarity. It is a work of art and
I'll bet it will still be read and admired in seventy-five years' - The Times The Sea is
John Banville's remarkable Booker prize-winning exploration of memory childhood and loss.
When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood
holiday he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace
family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Mr and Mrs Grace with their
worldly ease and candour were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his
contemporaries the Grace twins Myles and Chloe who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them
intricately even intimately. What happened next would haunt him for the rest of his years and
shape everything that was to follow. Part of the Picador Collection a series celebrating
fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
