“A dream of more than one world, more than one time.… [Ghosts] is a novel to be read like a poem … or perhaps even like the … biblical Book of Revelation, that prototypical vision by an island castaway.… There are both Joycean and Yeatsian atmospheres about this most ambitious [novel]; Joycean with its madcap mix of vulgar and classical, Yeatsian with its enchanted island and tower, its screaming and circling gulls, its golden world.”
—Boston Globe
“Haunting. Ghosts has a melancholy power that will draw the reader back for further bids to plumb its mysteries.”
—The New Statesman
“A glimpse inside a man’s haunted chilly soul.… There are magical evocations in these pages of the play of sun and rain on an island’s landscape.… Sights, sounds, smells and moods are all beautifully conjured, then painted over lightly with a chiaroscuro of menace.… The reader is entranced by the virtuosity of Mr. Banville’s prose.”
—The New York Times
“Extraordinary.… [Banville] is a writer whose imagery is as gloriously pungent as his metaphysics are dense.… A display of dazzling reflections.”
—The Village Voice
“Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift of seeing people’s souls.”
—Don DeLillo