A thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita.

‘Sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose’ Sunday Times

Athena is the third in the Frames Trilogy, a set of loosely connected novels by the Booker Prize-winning author, John Banville.

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 odder, is an offer of a love – of a sort. Written in typically luminous prose and featuring a rich cast of characters, Athena is a paean to art, painting, and love, in all its mercurial richness.

"One of the most profoundly intelligent, introspective novels of recent years, questioning the perceptions of author, narrator, reader and critic." - Good Book Guide

"The consummately achieved and entrancing creation of a master of language: in the fullest sense a work of art." - Scotsman

"Athena is a love letter to Morrow’s passions, to love, to art and to the paintings he examines: works on classical themes, in which a moment’s obsession, lust, loss and magic are preserved for ever." - Literary Review