Mrs. Osmond

A Novel

By: John Banville

Narrated by: Amy Finegan

Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, a dazzling and audacious new novel that extends the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, into unexpected territory.

Isabel Archer is a young American woman swept off to Europe in the late 19th century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naïve girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and - as Isabel finds out too late - cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate. On a trip to England to visit her cousin Ralph Touchett on his deathbed, Isabel is offered a chance to free herself from the marriage but nonetheless chooses to return to Italy. Banville follows James' story line to this point, but Mrs. Osmond is thoroughly Banville's own: the narrative inventiveness; the lyrical precision and surprise of his language; the layers of emotional and psychological intensity; the subtle, dark humor. And when Isabel arrives in Italy - along with someone else! - the novel takes off in directions that James himself would be thrilled to follow.

©2017 John Banville (P)2017 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Banville’s ability to channel James’s style and prose rhythms is astonishing. I can’t imagine anyone who could have done it better.”(Jeffrey Eugenides, The New York Times Book Review)

"As impressive an act of stylistic channeling as anything I’ve read.... Like its source text, Mrs. Osmond investigates what happens when liberty runs up against those forces that would constrain it: personal history, secret plots, money, evil itself.” (Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe)

“Banville is one of the best novelists in English.... Mrs Osmond is both a remarkable novel in its own right and a superb pastiche.” (Edmund White, The Guardian)