The Sea, by John Banville

John Banville's latest novel was one of the best that I've read last year. The Sea is where Max Morden, a middle-aged art historian, come back to the Irish seaside village of Ballyless after his wife dies of cancer. There he spent summer holidays as a boy and encountered with the wealthy and sophisticated Grace family, first with the mother, and then with the daughter, who mysteriously changed his life. While there, he alternately remembers his life with his wife and that summer holiday with the Grace family. These relationships with these three women have a decisive influence in his life. In his memory, he sees himself, ten or eleven, young and impressionable, voluntarily orphaning himself from his "transparent parents". The narrator looks back to the magical encounter in childhood that forever fired the imagination. He says that that was the year of the magical tide . Children and sex, love and death, happiness and sadness are the memories that will make he has come to be himself. Max is also the defeated man who receive the shake hands from doctor Todd -the doctor who treats Anna, his wife, who tells him in a cold way: “-Tell me the truth, doctor. -She is dying". I believe that John Banbille will be one of the most great writers in English like Conrad or Nabokov