**A classic novel of family, isolation and a blighted Ireland from the Booker Prize–winning author of *The Sea* depicts ** the end of innocence for a boy and his country.** Once the big house on an Irish estate, Birchwood has turned into a dilapidated family manor filled with memories and despair. One disaster succeeds another, until young Gabriel Godkin runs away to join a traveling circus and look for his long-lost twin sister. Soon he discovers that famine and unrest stalk the countryside, and Ireland is ruined too. Told with lyrical prose, John Banville’s *Birchwood* ** is the elegiac story of the aristocratic decline of an eccentric family riddled with dark secrets. John Banville is one of the greatest masters of the English language. — *The Scotsman*