Lage Prijs Athena – John Banville

A thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita.’Sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose’ Sunday Times Morrow – a clerkish, middle-aged type encumbered with a chain-smoking dying aunt and a considerable talent for wallowing – is at a loose end when, on two separate occasions, he is beckoned up the stairs of an empty Dublin house. The first is an offer of dubious work, and Morrow soon becomes caught up in a conspiracy to authenticate a series of fake paintings. The second, possibly even …