Birchwood

"Birchwood represents a watershed in contemporary Irish writing: it is a novel in which history becomes rich black comedy full of land agitation and Gothic characters." -Colm TóibínA classic novel of family, isolation and a blighted Ireland from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea depicts the end of innocence for a boy and his country. Once the big house on an Irish estate, Birchwood has turned into a dilapidated family manor filled with memories and despair. One disaster succeeds another, until young Gabriel Godkin runs away to join a traveling circus and look for his long-lost twin sister. Soon he discovers that famine and unrest stalk the countryside, and Ireland is ruined too. Told with lyrical prose, John Banville's Birchwood is the elegiac story of the aristocratic decline of an eccentric family riddled with dark secrets. "This is one of the most startling of the century's varied achievements in Irish writing." -Seamus Deane "John Banville is one of the greatest masters of the English language." -The Scotsman