From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a splendidly moving, hypnotic exploration (The New York Times) of identity, duplicity, and desire, starring a very old, recently widowed man with secrets and the mysterious young woman destined to either destroy or save him.

One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton’s Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable narrator of John Banville’s masterful new
novel, is the bearer of a fearsome reputation as
a literary dandy and bully. A product of the Old World, he is also an escapee from
its conflagrations, with the wounds to prove it. And everything about him is a lie.

Now those lies have been unraveled by a mysterious young woman whom Vander calls

Miss Nemesis.
They are to meet in Turin, a city best known for its enigmatic shroud.
Is her purpose to destroy Vander or to save him-or simply to show him what lies beneath
the shroud in which he has wrapped his life?