John Banville - Doctor Copernicus - 1976

First edition with dustwrapper.

Conditie; Original blue boards with gilt lettering to spine. Dustjacket (design Philip Mann) somewhat discolored, especially the spine. Not price-clipped (£ 3.90 net). Small signature on titlepage. Book F, dustwrapper NF.

¶ Doctor Copernicus is a novel by John Banville, first published in 1976. "A richly textured tale" about Nicolaus Copernicus, it won that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
It is the first volume of Banville's "Revolution Trilogy", of which Kepler (1981) and "The Newton Letter" (1982) are the other volumes.
Doctor Copernicus contains four sections. The first two focus on the subject's life until about the age of 36. In the third, Copernicus's aide Rheticus narrates how he convinced Copernicus to publish De Revolutionibus. The fourth focuses on the great scientist's death.
Thirty years after it first appeared Brian McIlroy praised Doctor Copernicus for its "great intellectual ambition." Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism, that it is a "historiographic metafiction."