The Sea is John Banville's remarkable, Booker prize-winning exploration of memory, childhood and loss. 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.

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. What happened next would haunt him for the rest of his years, and shape everything that was to follow. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.