John Banville writes:

As Exit Ghost opens, Zuckerman is returning to New York, for treatment for prostate cancer, after spending 11 years alone as an artist-anchorite ‘in a small house on a dirt road in the deep country’, without a phone or a computer or a DVD player, just, as ever, writing, writing, writing. Now, back in the clang and snarl of the city once again, he feels himself to be ‘a revenant, a man who’d cut himself off from sustained human contact and its possibilities yielding to the illusion of starting again’. Now he quickly has three encounters which bring him bang up against life again, life in all its disorder, silliness and tragic grandeur.

(LRB 4 October 2007)

Cape | hardback 292 pp. |ISBN: 9780224081733