Venice. Winter 1900. Evelyn Dolman, an English hack writer, is on a belated honeymoon with Laura, the daughter of a wealthy American plutocrat. Things are not, however, going swimmingly. There is a friction between the pair, and this state of affairs is not improved by the otherworldly events – including mysterious faces glimpsed at windows – that befall the couple. They’re staying at the ancestral home of Count Barbarigo – a place of innumerable rooms – but when Evelyn isn’t able to sleep on their first evening there, he ventures out alone into the night and eventually runs into a man who claims to have been at school with him. ‘Venetian Vespers’ is a gothic thriller that unfurls with the slowest of burns; but John Banville injects the tale with such a deliciously doomy atmosphere that you don’t mind spending time in his fog-drenched Venice with its late night bars and draughty palaces. RM

Published by 

Faber & Faber