Shroud. London: Picador, 2002. First Edition. Limited Issue. Publisher’s quarter black morocco cloth boards. A fine bright copy.

Limited Edition of 80 Copies, Signed by the Author. This copy being one of 15 bound thus, and numbered 4 of 5 out-of-series.

Described as one of the author’s most emotionally intense novels, it is the second book in the Alexander and Cass Cleave Trilogy, which also contains the novels Eclipse, published in 2000, and Ancient Light, published in 2012.

Banville has said that this is one of his favourite novels—”a dark, hard, cruel book”, one in which he came closest to achieving what he set out to write at the start of the writing process. He also noted that “Everybody hated Shroud—even, I think, the people who admired it. It was favourably reviewed, but it was not and is not a book a reader could readily love. Shroud is my monstrous child whom I cherish but who horrifies others.”