"We carry the dead with us only until we die too"

"Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations...True, there will be something of us that will remain, a fading photograph, a lock of hair, a few fingerprints, a sprinkling of atoms in the air of the room where we breathed our last, yet none of this will be us, what we are and were, but only the dust of the dead."

 Winner of the Man Booker Prize and John Banville's 18th novel, The Sea is told in Max Morden's viewpoint.  Reeling from his wife's death, Max retreats to a cottage by the sea where he used to spend his summers.  It is there that we are taken in a journey through his recollections of his childhood summers with the Graces and the time before his wife's death.  The novel was poignant and honest and all praises for this book are well-deserved.