The Sea by John BanvilleAlfred A. Knopf, 2005 (originally Picador, 2005)

Light and place and atmosphere: weathers and seasons beautifully described. This book is full of unusual words, elegant turns of phrase. Not much action, but the past: what we remember and how memory is true or false, the things we don’t see at all or the things we see wrongly, or the things we see rightly but remember wrongly. I found myself impatient, but then the end, or rather, the part almost at the end that’s a return to the beginning, redeemed it. The narrator asks, “Was’t well done?” and there’s just one proper Shakespearian answer: “Bravely, my diligence. Thou shalt be free.”