The writer of the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, John Banville is one of the most critically-acclaimed writers of his generation. The Godleys gather at the family home of Arden to attend their father's bedside. Adam, the eldest, and Petra, only nineteen, find relations with their stepmother, Ursula, and their dying father, are as strained as ever. Adam's relationship with his wife, Helen, seems too on the brink of collapse and Petra, fragile and deeply troubled, finds deepest relief in her own pain. In electrifying prose, Banville captures the aching intensity, magic and enchantment, of a single midsummer's day in Arden.