Recommendations
Books Like The Sea
Best books to read after The Sea by John Banville
John Banville's The Sea is the Booker Prize-winning Irish novel of grief, memory, and a lost childhood summer — one of the most formally accomplished novels in the Booker's history. These recommendations explore the tradition of the Irish literary novel and the prose-rich novel of retrospective narration, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel that mourns what cannot be recovered.
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Buy on AmazonThe Book of Evidence
by John Banville
The essential companion Banville — Freddie Montgomery, a murderer narrating his crime from prison in Banville's characteristically sumptuous prose; the novel that established Banville's mature style and the one most often recommended alongside The Sea as the entry point for his literary fiction.
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Buy on AmazonThe Infinities
by John Banville
The companion Banville — a dying old mathematician on his estate, narrated by Hermes; more playful and mythologically rich than The Sea, and the Banville novel that most directly shows his range beyond the retrospective grief mode of his best-known work.
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Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The companion in the tradition of the novel of retrospective grief and regret told in formal, carefully wrought prose — Stevens the butler; the non-Irish literary novel most frequently cited alongside The Sea as the companion in the tradition of the man who has suppressed what mattered most.
- 4Buy on Amazon
A Month in the Country
by J.L. Carr
The companion British novel of retrospective happiness — Tom Birkin narrating the best summer of his life from decades later; shares The Sea's structure of an elderly man looking back at a period of his youth that was the emotional center of his life, and its meditation on what happiness felt like before everything went wrong.
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Buy on AmazonGilead
by Marilynne Robinson
The American companion in the tradition of the prose-rich retrospective novel — John Ames writing to his young son; shares The Sea's quality of beautiful, formally deliberate prose in the service of a meditation on loss, time, and what a life amounts to when examined from its end.
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Buy on AmazonBirchwood
by John Banville
Banville's early novel — Gabriel Godkin narrating the history of his family's Big House in the Irish midlands; an earlier and more conventionally plotted Banville than The Sea, but one that shows the Irish Gothic tradition that underlies his mature work.
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Buy on AmazonGrief Is the Thing with Feathers
by Max Porter
The companion in the tradition of the short, prose-poem novel of grief — a father and his two sons after the death of their mother, visited by a Crow figure; the contemporary British novel of grief most often cited alongside The Sea as the companion in the tradition of the formally experimental short novel about loss.
- 8Buy on Amazon
The Go-Between
by L.P. Hartley
The companion in the tradition of the English novel of a man looking back at a childhood summer that defined everything after it — Leo at sixty, finding his diary of the summer of 1900; shares The Sea's structure of an elderly male narrator whose most significant experiences are half a century behind him, and whose retrospective narration is both mourning and an attempt at understanding.
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