Athena

Sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose Sunday Times Athena is the third in the Frames Trilogy, a set of loosely connected novels by the Booker Prize-winning author, John Banville. Morrow a clerkish, middle-aged type encumbered with a chain-smoking dying aunt and a considerable talent for wallowing is at a loose end when, on two separate occasions, he is beckoned up the stairs of an empty Dublin house. The first is an offer of dubious work, and Morrow soon becomes caught up in a conspiracy to authenticate a series of fake paintings. The second, possibly even odder, is an offer of a love of a sort. Written in typically luminous prose and featuring a rich cast of characters, Athena is a paean to art, painting, and love, in all its mercurial richness.