‘This is unequivocally a work of brilliance.’ – Justin Cartwright, Spectator

Old Adam Godley’s time on earth is drawing to an end, and as his wife and children gather at the family home, little do they realize that they are not the only ones who have come to observe the spectacle.

The mischievous Greek gods, too, have come; as tensions fray and desire bubbles over, their spying soon becomes intrusion becomes intervention, until the mortals’ lives – right before their eyes – seem to be changing faster than they can cope with.

Overflowing with bawdy humour, Banville has allowed his twinkling eye to rove through memories of the past and relationships of the present in this moving family drama. The Infinities is both a salacious delight and a penetrating exploration of the terrifying, wonderful, immutable plight of being human.

‘A poetic vision of boundless possibility.’ – Literary Review

‘Full of dark humour and written with a deft eye for detail.’ – GQ

‘This darkly comic and fearsomely clever creation is a heady delight’ – Metro

‘Written in such saturatedly beautiful, luminous prose that every page delights, startles and uplifts.’ – The Times

Published
2010
Where to find this book
External links open a book search at the selected retailer. Availability may vary.

Additional book details

Author

John Banville

John Banville (born 1945) is an Irish novelist and screenwriter. His breakthrough novel The Book of Evidence (1989) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He sometimes writes under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Banville is known for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. His stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".