Changes

|title=Ancient Light

|author=John Banville

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=9780670920617

|pages=256

|publisher=Viking

|date=July 2012

|video=B7gD7ugjqUA

|summary=Banville's pace is slow but this is more a celebration of exquisite writing than a gripping plot. The narrator looks back on an old love affair in this evocative book. Not much happens but it is always beautifully described.

}}

The narrator in John Banville's ''Ancient Light'' is Alex Cleave, a stage actor in the curtain call of his career. For reasons that become clearer towards the end of the book, he is recalling his first relationship, when as a teenager in 1950s Ireland, he had a passionate affair with the mother of his best friend. However, his past is also blighted by recollections of his own daughter's suicide ten years previously.

Memory is also much on the writer's mind in [[The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes]] which makes an ideal companion read to this book.

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