Time Pieces by John Banville (9781473619043)

Description - Time Pieces by John Banville

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. Yeats's daughter Anne, a painter, lived in the flat below; Patrick Kavanagh would often take a rest from a hard day's drinking, sitting on the steps of the house and glaring at the Dolmen Press offices on the other side of the street; and one fine summer afternoon there was the enchanting sight of poet Thomas Kinsella, in his Civil Service suit, strolling down Baggot Street enjoying an ice-cream cone.

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 the 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 stunning images of the city by photographer Paul Joyce.

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