The Book of Evidence is a 1989 novel by the Irish author John Banville. The book is narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a 38 year old scientist, who murders a servant girl during an attempt to steal a painting from a neighbor. Freddie is an aimless drifter, and though he is a perceptive observer of himself and his surroundings, he is largely amoral. The end of the novel makes it unclear whether anything Freddie has said is true. When asked by the inspector how much of it is true, Freddie responds, "True, Inspector? All of it. None of it. Only the shame." The Book of Evidence won Ireland 's Guinness Peat Aviation Award in 1989, and was short-listed for Britain 's Booker Prize. In reviewing the book, Publishers Weekly compared Banville's writing to that of Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The writing style continues Banville's attempt to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has"

A group of strangers, passengers on a day-boat that runs aground, are washed up on an island. Shaken and sodden, they nonetheless make quick work of the situation at hand. But what is the situation? They've invaded the closely protected enclave of an eminent art historian, but their presence seems to rouse in the historian's assistant a long-ripening hunger for company. Certainly the grounding of the boat was an accident, but one of the passengers seem to know the professor and to have an air of purpose about him. Why as their day on the island progresses, do they seem to inhabit a series of weighty tableaux? And who is the man who moves among them as both spectator and player, the nameless, seemingly haunted narrator whose sensibility is the sometimes clarifing, sometimes distorting lens through which we view the action? Invoking all lost souls and enchanted islands, Ghosts gives us a brilliant mix of gaiety and menace to tell a story about the failures and triumphs of the imagination, about time's passage, and about the frailty of human happiness. It is an exquisitely written novel — stately and theatrical — by one of the most widely admired and acclaimed writers at work today