Get our Best Book Club Books of 2025 eBook!

Summary and Reviews of The Sea by John Banville

The Sea by John Banville

The Sea

by John Banville
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • First Published:
  • Nov 1, 2005, 195 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2006, 208 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

A luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize.

A luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the "barely bearable raw immediacy" of his childhood memories.

Interwoven with this story are Morden's memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him "like a second heart."

What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.

Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!
  • award image

    Booker Prize
    2005

Reviews

Media Reviews

The Washington Post - John Crowley
Banville's achievement seems remarkable to me. Banville appears to be fining down his writing to the central impulse of all his mature work, which he stated long ago in the extravagant Gothic tale Birchwood : "We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. The first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.

Booklist - Brad Hooper
Starred Review. Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize for Fiction, Irishman Banville's new book does more than simply explore a life. It explores life.

Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert
The novel is written in a complex, luminous prose that might strike some as occasionally overblown ... The result? A breathtaking but sometimes frustrating novel. Highly recommended.

Publishers Weekly
Like the strange high tide that figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



The Booker Prize was established by the Booker McConnell company in 1969, and is  considered to be one of most important literary awards in the UK, if not the most important. In recent years it has been sponsored by the Man Group, an investment company, and thus is officially known as The Man Booker Prize, but is more often referred to simply as 'The Booker'.

Pierre Bonnard: Max has a tendency to muse over the paintings of Pierre Bonnard and in particular Bonnard's paintings ...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Sea, try these:

  • The Magician jacket

    The Magician

    by Colm Toibin

    Published 2022

    About this book

    More by this author

    From one of today's most brilliant and beloved novelists, a dazzling, epic family saga centered on the life of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, spanning a half-century including World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War.

  • This Is Happiness jacket

    This Is Happiness

    by Niall Williams

    Published 2021

    About this book

    More by this author

    A profound and enchanting new novel from Booker Prize-longlisted author Niall Williams about the loves of our lives and the joys of reminiscing.

We have 16 read-alikes for The Sea, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by John Banville
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Devil Finds Work
by James Baldwin
A book-length essay on racism in American films, by "the best essayist in this country" (The New York Times Book Review).
Book Jacket
Real Americans
by Rachel Khong
From the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, a novel exploring family, identity, and the shaping of destiny.
Book Jacket
The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris
by Evie Woods
From the million-copy bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Happy Land
    by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

    From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.

  • Book Jacket

    The Fairbanks Four
    by Brian Patrick O’Donoghue

    One murder, four guilty convictions, and a community determined to find justice.

  • Book Jacket

    The Seven O'Clock Club
    by Amelia Ireland

    Four strangers join an experimental treatment to heal broken hearts in Amelia Ireland's heartfelt debut novel.

  • Book Jacket

    One Death at a Time
    by Abbi Waxman

    A cranky ex-actress and her Gen Z sobriety sponsor team up to solve a murder that could send her back to prison in this dazzling mystery.

Who Said...

A library is thought in cold storage

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

A C on H S

and be entered to win..