Praise for The Silver Swan

"Grippingly propulsive. . . .Christine Falls was the most artful noir mystery in years; The Silver Swan is better."
--Los Angeles Times

"[Banville's] sinuous prose, subtle eroticism, and 1950s period detail do more than enough to put this series on the map."
--The New York Times Book Review

"The 1950s Dublin setting--all Guinness drays, blackbird song and biscuit-factory smells--is rendered as sensuously as it would be in any novel by Banville, a writer having fun of the highest standard."
--The Guardian

"The Silver Swan is a defter and more complex book than its predecessor....The new novel boasts a neat whodunnit plot and a delightful command of suspense, but there's also a kind of mordant, near-surreal playfulness about the characters' appearance and actions this time, and the constricted dance that they undertake."
--The Independent

"The creeping sense of menace, corruption and existential despair is pure Banville and gives this tale of sexual obsession and betrayal its edge."
--The Times (London)

"[Banville] proved he could walk the crime-fiction walk with the Edgar(R)-nominated Christine Falls, and now his luminous prose gets an even better infrastructure in the sequel, a faster-paced, further melancholic slice of the noir life of Dublin pathologist Quirke."
--The Baltimore Sun

"[A] brilliant book."
--The Seattle Times

"A satisfying blend of the muck, and pluck, of the Irish. . . .The author knows 1950s Dublin inside and out and the narrative drives onward with pitch-perfect passages."
--The Christian Science Monitor

"A stunning follow-up to Christine Falls."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[Banville] is a superb, evocative writer."
--The Miami Herald

"If you like your mysteries like Guinness--dark and Irish--look no further."
--Rocky Mountain News (Denver)

"Banville...never stoop[s] to cliché in word, image, or concept. . . . The delicate but inexorable suspense grows in the natural way, from misunderstanding, deceit, loneliness, and fear."
--The Oregonian (Portland)

Praise for John Banville

"Ireland's greatest living novelist...a literary polymath."
--The New York Times

"A grand writer with a seductive style."
--The New York Times Book Review

"The Irish master."
--The New Yorker

"One of the best novelists in English."
--The Guardian

"One of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today.
--The Washington Post

"[Banville's] books are like baroque cathedrals."
--The Paris Review

"Prodigiously gifted. He cannot write an unpolished phrase."
--The Independent

"One periodically rereads a [Banville] sentence just to marvel at its beauty."
--USA Today

"Banville is a master at capturing the most fleeting memory or excruciating twinge of self-awareness with riveting accuracy."
--People