![]() The South Korean writer Cho Nam-Joo is best known for her 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The i Paper. You read him because, every few pages, there’s a sentence “so perfectly contrived it stops you for a moment, achingly, like a beautiful stranger passing in the street”. Fortunately, “you don’t read Banville for his taut plots”. ![]() But “no one dies”, or even falls out and, in fact, little of consequence happens. With its “assembly of characters” and country house setting, this novel seems to have the “makings of a whodunnit”, said Tom Ball in The Times. ![]() One doesn’t begrudge Banville his “game with his readers”: The Singularities is a “pleasure to read”. Various characters from that work are joined by William Jaybey (from The Newton Letter) and Freddie Montgomery (from The Book of Evidence), among others. The setting is Arden House – the crumbling Irish country house from Banville’s 2009 work The Infinities. But The Singularities takes this to extremes: so stuffed is it with “old Banville protagonists” that it is close to being a “literary greatest-hits collection”. ![]() As the author of three trilogies, John Banville is “no stranger to using recurring characters”, said Ian Critchley in Literary Review. ![]()
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