Publisher Description
The classic novel by "Irish master" (New Yorker) and Booker Prize–winner John Banville brings to life the dramatic and surprising world of sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolas Copernicus and the theory that would shatter the medieval view of the universe.
Sixteenth-century Europe is teeming with change and controversy: wars are being waged by princes and bishops and the repercussions of Luther are being felt through a convulsing Germany. In a remote corner of Poland, a modest canon is practicing medicine and studying the heavens, preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe. In this astonishing work of historical imagination, John Banville offers a vivid portrait of a man of painful reticence. For, in a world that is equal parts splendor and barbarism, an obscure cleric who seeks “the secret music of the universe” poses a most devastating threat.
"A tour de force… Exciting, beautifully written and astonishingly redolent of the late medieval world." —The Times
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About John Banville
John Banville is the author of more than twenty novels, as well as nonfiction and plays. Time Pieces was a New York Times bestseller, and The Sea won the 2005 Booker Prize. He has also won the Franz Kafka Prize, the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Best Novel, and the Prince of Asturias Award, Spain’s most important literary prize. He was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945, and lives in Dublin.
About John Lee
John Lee is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He has twice won acclaim as AudioFile’s Best Voice in Fiction & Classics. He also narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays. He is an accomplished stage actor and has written and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit. He played Alydon in the 1963–64 Doctor Who serial The Daleks.