We have updated our Privacy Policy Please take a moment to review it. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the terms of our updated Privacy Policy.

Hardcover / ISBN-13: 9781473619043

Price: £24.99

ON SALE: 20th October 2016

Genre: Biography & True Stories / Memoirs

Select a format:

ebook

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

‘If you’re interested in Dublin, or if you’re interested in the novelist John Banville, or if you’re interested in radiantly superb sentences about whatever – I’m all three – then Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir is a book you’ll not be able to put down’ The Guardian

‘A trove of arresting imagery, from the lushly poetic to the luridly absurd … utterly delightful’ Irish Times

‘Delicious … Banville’s soarings, like a hawk’s, are both wild and comprehensive, taking in everything and imagining more’ New York Times

For the young John Banville, Dublin was a place of enchantment and yearning. Each year, on his birthday – the 8th of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception – he and his mother would journey by train to the capital city, passing frosted pink fields at dawn, to arrive at Westland Row and the beginning of a day’s adventures that included much-anticipated trips to Clery’s and the Palm Beach ice-cream parlour.

The aspiring writer first came to live in the city when he was eighteen. In a once grand but now dilapidated flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped.

It was a cold time, for society and for the individual – one the writer would later explore through the famed Benjamin Black protagonist Quirke – but underneath the seeming permafrost a thaw was setting in, and Ireland was beginning to change.

Alternating between vignettes of Banville’s own past, and present-day historical explorations of the city, Time Pieces is a vivid evocation of childhood and memory – that ‘bright abyss’ in which ‘time’s alchemy works’ – and a tender and powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man.

Accompanied by images of the city by photographer Paul Joyce.

What's Inside

Read More Read Less

Reviews

John Banville treats the business of memoir with the elegance of a practised flaneur, weaving into his personal tale a portrait of the Dublin he discovered on boyhood visits from Wexford in the 1950s ... Dublin's streets, squares, gardens and gateways, beautifully photographed by Paul Joyce, reflect the writer's own lost past, early experiences and first love. But the surprise, perhaps, is in the recurrent plangent note of regret or self-criticism. This is what makes Time Pieces an oddly affecting book
TLS
Being led around the streets and dim back warrens of Dublin by the prodigious and endlessly amused-'n'-amusing John Banville is a literary hop-on-hop-off not to be missed. The sentences alone in Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir are worth your ticket.
Richard Ford, Financial Times
If you're interested in Dublin, or if you're interested in the novelist John Banville, or if you're interested in radiantly superb sentences about whatever - I'm all three - then Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir (Hachette Ireland) is a book you'll not be able to put down
The Guardian
Banville is the greatest living master of simile and metaphor in prose, and Time Pieces is a trove of arresting imagery, from the lushly poetic to the luridly absurd ... [An] utterly delightful book'
Irish Times
John Banville's self-portrait evokes the hard-hearted, heartbroken anti-heroes of his fiction. Although Time Pieces excavates some of Dublin's key moments and periods ... its real speciality is in capturing the more abstract romance of city life. Banville is an expert in melancholy urban phenomena: the pleasures of dilapidation and overgrown parklands, the long-gone, gaudy shops of one's past that blaze in the memory
Financial Times
A beautifully crafted, carefully shaped work of art ... [Banville] has written beautifully - in Time Pieces no less than in his extraordinary novels
Sunday Business Post
It's the author's love letter to a city he first encountered on annual excursions with his mother from the Wexford of his birth and upbringing. And, as such, it's extraordinarily evocative of a not-quite-vanished metropolis ... it's in his vivid reminiscences of Dublin in the 1950s and early 1960s that the book finds its true heart
Irish Independent
A moving paean to the city that helped shape the artist as a young man
Image magazine
[an] intriguing blend of reminiscence and quirky guide to some of the capital's enduring treasures
Irish Independent
Handsomely published ... for those who know Dublin, or dream of it from afar, there will be much in Time Pieces that is delightful. Rich with lived experience and the pining for things past, in more sense than one it is a book John Banville has been waiting his whole life to write
Sunday Times