A. S Byatt
“Majestic ... Dazzling ... Wonderful.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
When children’s...
“Rich, acerbic, wise.... [Byatt] tackles nothing less than what it means to be human.” —Vogue
Frederica Potter, a smart, spirited 33-year-old single mother, lucks into a...
In two breathtakingly accomplished novellas, A. S. Byatt explores the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion.
In "Morpho Eugenia", a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a wealthy family and immediately falls for the eldest daughter. But before long the family's clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutable as the behavior of insects.
...Winner of England’s Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces...
Includes the story “The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye”—the basis for the George Miller film Three Thousand Years of Longing starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton
A.S....
"Complex and thoughtful."—The Times Literary Supplement
When they were little girls, Cassandra and Julia played a game in which they entered an alternate world modeled on the landscapes of Arthurian romance. Now the sisters are grown, and hostile strangers—until...
"At once quirky and deep, brimming with generosity, imagination, and intelligence." —The New Yorker
In Morpho Eugenia, an explorer realises...
10) Babel Tower
At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent...
Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie...
16) Still life
Forty of the most famous and celebrated stories from the Brothers Grimm translated and edited by a leading professor of folklore.
Even after two hundred years, the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm remain among our most powerful stories. Their scenes of unsparing savagery and jaw-dropping beauty remind us that fairy tales, in all their simplicity, have the power to change us. With some of the most famous stories in world
...20) The Bell
A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly the old bell, a legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. And then things begin to change. Meanwhile the wise old...