Berk Worms Book Club: Booker Prize Winner

Welcome to the Berk Worms Book Club🐛 2025. Each month we all read the same book that we have chosen from a particular genre and then meet to discuss it as well as other books we are reading.

For August, 2025, we have chosen to read a Booker Prize Winning novel. Our chosen novel is the 2005 winner, written by John Banville and entitled ‘The Sea’. It runs at approximately 270 pages. It is available in all formats, including Kindle and Audible. It may also be available at the local library if you get in quickly!

About the Novel:

https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-the-sea-by-john-banville

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. Grieving the loss of his wife, Max finds himself reflecting on her final days, as well as his childhood and the experiences that shaped his life, including the summer spent in Ballyless where he met the Grace family when he was 11 years old. The Grace family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Mr and Mrs Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins Myles and Chloe, who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow.

About the author:

Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of thirteen previous novels including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

Critical views:

‘A masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected’ Professor John Sutherland, Chair of Judges, Man Booker Prize 2005

Reading ahead with the BERKWORMS

9 September: we are reading a Dystopian novel entitled I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Hartman.

October: we are reading a book about Culture - to be selected in our August meet up.

Happy reading, 🐛Cazza