For the young John Banville, Dublin was a place of enchantment and yearning.

Each year, on his birthday – the 8th of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception – he and his mother would journey by train to the capital city, passing frosted pink fields at dawn, to arrive at Westland Row and the beginning of a day’s adventures that included much-anticipated trips to Clery’s and the Palm Beach ice-cream parlour. The aspiring writer first came to live in the city when he was eighteen. In a once grand but now dilapidated flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped.

It was a cold time, for society and for the individual – one the writer would later explore through the famed Benjamin Black protagonist Quirke – but underneath the seeming permafrost a thaw was setting in, and Ireland was beginning to change. Alternating between vignettes of Banville’s own past, and present-day historical explorations of the city, Time Pieces is a vivid evocation of childhood and memory – that ‘bright abyss’ in which ‘time’s alchemy works’ – and a tender and powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man. Accompanied by images of the city by photographer Paul Joyce.

Format: Hardcover
Published: in Ireland in 2016
Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland
Pages: 224
Language: English
ISBN 13: 9781473619043
ISBN 10: 1473619041