Banville whips up a heady brew in his favourite city

FICTION: Prague Nights, By Benjamin Black, Viking, €17

John Banville takes readers on a mysterious journey in Prague Nights PIc: Getty

The latest novel by John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, is not a Quirke thriller, but a gothic whodunnit set in the court of Rudolph II in Prague at the end of the 16th century, a city which “sat atop a stew of squalor, vice and violence”.

When young doctor Christian Stern, the illegitimate son of a dead bishop, arrives in the city in 1599, he is full of hope. Prague, after all, ...