The Singularities

A Novel

By: John Banville

Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith

Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

From the revered Booker Prize-winning author comes a playful, multilayered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory, which opens with the return of one of his most celebrated characters as he is released from prison.

“A triumphant piece of writing…Prose of such luscious elegance…Exhilarating.”—The New York Times Book Review

A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car—also borrowed—onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request.

With sparkling intelligence and rapier wit, John Banville revisits some of his career’s most memorable figures, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived. The Singularities occupies a singular space and will surely be one of his most admired works.

©2022 John Banville (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Reading John Banville is like being in the presence of a fathomlessly talented, witty, and intelligent magician—someone so captivatingly masterful at their craft, you suspect that they could make you disappear. The Singularities proves that [Banville] deserves a summons from Stockholm . . . Time and again Banville stuns with sentences so dazzling they’re like a lightning-quick boxer’s jab.”—Randy Rosenthal, Boston Globe

“A triumphant piece of writing . . . John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance that it’s all too easy to view his work as an aesthetic project . . . Like much of his best work, [The Singularities] aims to both scrutinize and confront one of the central challenges of the human endeavor: how to create an accurate portrait of things . . . Exhilarating.”—Leo Robson, New York Times Book Review

“A bold, mind-bending novel . . . The Singularities is Banville at his most inventive . . . His verbal dexterity and poetic flourishes keep us absorbed throughout.”—Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune

I'm mystified by this sly book

This is a weird, sly book that doubles back on itself in odd self-referential ways, and I'm just not sure what to make of it. The writing is gorgeous, arch and luscious; the narration superb, but I lost my footing in this weird realm of slippery and unreliable reality.

No, not this

There are some books as enjoyable in audio as read. This is not one.

John Banville - the best

This is a marvelous book by one of today's best writers. Highly recommend this book and author.

A brilliant portrayal of a bleak and forbidding world

The exquisite syntax, brilliantly narrated, kept me listening to the story of a loveless, amoral world. The only smiles in this story are sardonic, or icy, or mocking. The first character to whom we are introduced is an unrepentant murderer, and we are taught to think of him as no worse, or better, than anyone else. Nihilistic to the nth degree and all in superb detail. It makes me want to flee to Dickens, or a Frank Capra movie.

Impossible

After waiting with special enthusiasm for this novel from one of my favourite authors, I was severely disappointed. I lost the plot about a quarter way through. It is extremely and unnecessarily elaborate, with much philosophizing over nonsense along the way. Seems to get denser and duller. The narration is sometimes histrionic and, how to put it?, overly self-conscious, the narrator being a sort of godhead looking down on the world below. I thought it was pretentious and boring. I'll give it another try again some time, but at present cannot recommend it.