Mrs. Osmond: A novel

by John Banville Narrated by Amy Finegan

Overview

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, a dazzling and audacious new novel that extends the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, into unexpected territory.

Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naïve girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and-as Isabel finds out too late-cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate. On a trip to England to visit her cousin Ralph Touchett on his deathbed, Isabel is offered a chance to free herself from the marriage, but nonetheless chooses to return to Italy. Banville follows James's story line to this point, but Mrs. Osmond is thoroughly Banville's own: the narrative inventiveness; the lyrical precision and surprise of his language; the layers of emotional and psychological intensity; the subtle, dark humor. And when Isabel arrives in Italy-along with someone else!-the novel takes off in directions that James himself would be thrilled to follow.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2017 - AudioFile

The famously convoluted narrative voice of Henry James sounds once again in John Banville’s outstanding sequel to James’s PORTRAIT OF A LADY. The work is brought to the audiobook format with equal expertise by narrator Amy Finegan. More tour de force than pastiche, Banville’s story picks up the same cast and storyline as the original, and the same elegant nineteenth-century milieu locked between dynamism and repression. Finegan conveys this subtle opposition in the voices of a score of complex and conflicted characters, and in her sure passage through the snares and quagmires of Jamesian syntax. Only in the dialogue of her heroine does she, to this ear, somewhat let listeners down, channeling a voice that is more uncertain, more timid, than the character whom James, or rather Banville, has conceived. But that’s a mere quibble with a performance that exceeds all expectations. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2017 - AudioFile

The famously convoluted narrative voice of Henry James sounds once again in John Banville’s outstanding sequel to James’s PORTRAIT OF A LADY. The work is brought to the audiobook format with equal expertise by narrator Amy Finegan. More tour de force than pastiche, Banville’s story picks up the same cast and storyline as the original, and the same elegant nineteenth-century milieu locked between dynamism and repression. Finegan conveys this subtle opposition in the voices of a score of complex and conflicted characters, and in her sure passage through the snares and quagmires of Jamesian syntax. Only in the dialogue of her heroine does she, to this ear, somewhat let listeners down, channeling a voice that is more uncertain, more timid, than the character whom James, or rather Banville, has conceived. But that’s a mere quibble with a performance that exceeds all expectations. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169151916
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/07/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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