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Title: The Infinities
Author: Banville, John
Format: HB; Picador
Price: £7.99

One midsummer’s day in Arden, the Godley family gather at their dying father’s bedside, a collection of troubled individuals with frayed relationships. At first the gods silently observe this group, but unable to resist intervention they then begin to tease, goad and manipulate their mortal playthings into taking actions beyond their conscious intent. This is a dazzling new novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea.

In a silent valley stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunei. Its owner is Aramon Lunei, an alcoholic so haunted by his past that he is incapable of all meaningful action. His sister, Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow and within sight of the Mars Lunei, dreams of exacting revenge for the betrayals that have blighted her life. This is a novel - as well imagined as any of Tremain’s previous works – about disputed physical and emotional territory, about sibling love, and about the devastation that revenge can wreak.

Whilst Dervla Murphy usually travels alone and by bicycle, for this journey to Cuba there are three generations of the family: grandmother Murphy, her daughter, and her daughter’s three girls. Still no concession to comfort is given – they are nothing if not adventurous, and find themselves sleeping on empty beaches accompanied only by crabs, mosquitoes and the stars above. This is not only a kind of transposed ‘Swallows and Amazons’, it is also a travel book which attempts to understand the revolution and the unique society that is modern Cuba.

1950’s Ireland and for Ellis Lacey opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges emigration to New York Ellis leaves her home and family. But the Brooklyn lodging house is crowded upon arrival, and Ellis is soon homesick. Tentative friendships are formed, and one person especially is encountered. Bad news, however, recalls her to Ireland and there she is confronted by the dilemmas of her displaced life: should she be loyal and stay with family or return to Brooklyn, the place her heart now more assuredly wishes to reside?

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world – but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them.