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Selected Stories from the Booker Prize Winner

Medusa’s Ankles

A luminous single-volume selection of short stories from the Booker prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt

A luminous selection of short stories from the Booker prize-winning A. S. Byatt, celebrating over thirty years of writing 
 
With an introduction by David Mitchell 
 
Byatt takes her readers to a place that is rich in ideas, vivid in colour and wholly unforgettable. Mirrors shatter at the hairdressers when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real. 
 
Peopled by artists, poets and fabulous creatures, these stories travel from the ancient mythic world to an English sweet factory, a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace. Blazing with creativity, they show what lies beneath the veneer of the ordinary, and reveal the fantastical possibilities beyond. 
 
'A cabinet of curiosities... Glitteringly beautiful' Sunday Times 
 
'A cerebral extravaganza, bristling with ideas' Spectator 
 
'Moving, witty and shocking' Sunday Telegraph

It was a pleasure to be reacquainted with 'Medusa's Ankles'... There's an echo of Iris Murdoch here, herself the subject of several books by Byatt

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL 
 
Mirrors shatter at the hairdressers when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real. 
 
Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and travel from Ancient myth to an English sweet factory, a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, a Turkish bazaar to a fairytale palace. 
 
Driven by curiosity, Byatt takes her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary and the gloss of the fantastical, to a place rich in ideas, vivid in colour and wholly unforgettable. 
 
'A cabinet of curiosities... Glitteringly beautiful. Byatt is a vivid colourist' Sunday Times 
 
'A cerebral extravaganza, bristling with ideas' Spectator 
 
'These little stories by one of Britain's foremost grandes dames of the writing world are a delightful surprise, packing a much greater punch than many full-length novels... They are moving, thought-provoking, witty and shocking all at once' Sunday Telegraph

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation plus selected short stories

The Frederica Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower & A Whistling Woman

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of A.S. Byatt's 'Frederica Quartet', plus selected short stories and a fascinating talk by the author 
 
Inspired by the novels of D.H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love, this ambitious quartet from Booker Prize-winning novelist A.S. Byatt charts the lives of the Potter family between 1953 and 1970. Set against the changing social and political landscape of England in the '50s and '60s, it follows the heroine, Frederica, from precocious teenager to TV talk show host, and from her Yorkshire home to the heart of swinging London. 
 
The Virgin in the Garden sees the Potters preparing to celebrate Elizabeth II's coronation, while Frederica auditions for a play about Elizabeth I written by the beautiful Alexander Wedderburn. Will she win the part, and Alexander's heart? In Still Life, Frederica's ambitions - both academic and sexual - come to fruition, as she gains a place at Cambridge University to study English - and men. In Babel Tower, she has given up her carefree, independent lifestyle - but as the Sixties' cultural revolution explodes and the quest for personal and public freedom becomes all-important, will settling down bring her happiness? And in A Whistling Woman, as events build to a tragic climax in Yorkshire, back in London, Frederica is faced with a difficult choice... These acclaimed adaptations star Rosemary Leach, Hannah Watkins and Indira Varma as Frederica. 
 
Also included are four fantastic short stories: 'The July Ghost', dramatised with a star cast including Kate Buffery and Clive Owen; and 'Rose-Coloured Teacups', 'Gode's Story' and 'A Stone Woman', read by Anna Massey, Sheila Mitchell and Penelope Wilton respectively. Plus, in Finding A Voice, A.S. Byatt reflects on her approach to her work, explaining where her desire to write came from and how she honed her craft. 
 
Track listing 
1: Introduction 
2-9: The Virgin in the Garden 
10-16: Still Life 
17-24: Babel Tower 
25-31: A Whistling Woman 
32: The July Ghost 
33: Rose-Coloured Teacups 
34: Gode's Story 
35-37: A Stone Woman 
38: Finding a Voice 
 
© 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
(p)2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
 
Text copyright © AS Byatt 1978 (The Virgin in the Garden), 1985 (Still Life), 1987 ('The July Ghost', 'Rose-Coloured Teacups'), 1994 ('Gode's Story'), 1996 (Babel Tower), 2002 (A Whistling Woman)

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of A.S. Byatt's 'Frederica Quartet', plus selected short stories and a fascinating talk by the author 
 
Inspired by the novels of D.H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love, this ambitious quartet from Booker Prize-winning novelist A.S. Byatt charts the lives of the Potter family between 1953 and 1970. Set against the changing social and political landscape of England in the '50s and '60s, it follows the heroine, Frederica, from precocious teenager to TV talk show host, and from her Yorkshire home to the heart of swinging London. 
 
The Virgin in the Garden sees the Potters preparing to celebrate Elizabeth II's coronation, while Frederica auditions for a play about Elizabeth I written by the beautiful Alexander Wedderburn. Will she win the part, and Alexander's heart? In Still Life, Frederica's ambitions - both academic and sexual - come to fruition, as she gains a place at Cambridge University to study English - and men. In Babel Tower, she has given up her carefree, independent lifestyle - but as the Sixties' cultural revolution explodes and the quest for personal and public freedom becomes all-important, will settling down bring her happiness? And in A Whistling Woman, as events build to a tragic climax in Yorkshire, back in London, Frederica is faced with a difficult choice... These acclaimed adaptations star Rosemary Leach, Hannah Watkins and Indira Varma as Frederica. 
 
Also included are four fantastic short stories: 'The July Ghost', dramatised with a star cast including Kate Buffery and Clive Owen; and 'Rose-Coloured Teacups', 'Gode's Story' and 'A Stone Woman', read by Anna Massey, Sheila Mitchell and Penelope Wilton respectively. Plus, in Finding A Voice, A.S. Byatt reflects on her approach to her work, explaining where her desire to write came from and how she honed her craft. 
 
Track listing 
1: Introduction 
2-9: The Virgin in the Garden 
10-16: Still Life 
17-24: Babel Tower 
25-31: A Whistling Woman 
32: The July Ghost 
33: Rose-Coloured Teacups 
34: Gode's Story 
35-37: A Stone Woman 
38: Finding a Voice 
 
© 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
(p)2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
 
Text copyright © AS Byatt 1978 (The Virgin in the Garden), 1985 (Still Life), 1987 ('The July Ghost', 'Rose-Coloured Teacups'), 1994 ('Gode's Story'), 1996 (Babel Tower), 2002 (A Whistling Woman)

Angels And Insects

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover, two magical and timeless novellas from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession

Like A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, these two mesmerising novellas are set in the nineteenth century. In Morpho Eugenia, an explorer realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In The Conjugal Angel, curious individuals – some fictional, others drawn from history – gather to connect with the spirit world. Throughout both, Byatt examines the eccentricities of the Victorian era, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance, science and faith into a sumptuous, magical tapestry.

A Novel

The Shadow of the Sun

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover, A.S. Byatt’s debut novel – the moving story of a young woman’s struggle for independence and identity

It is the height of summer. After she is expelled from boarding school, Anna Severell returns to the strict, orderly house of her father, a celebrated novelist. The family is soon joined by Oliver Canning, a talented young academic who urges her to take control of her future. As autumn begins and Anna enters university, the pair grow closer. A single mistake, however, could put her newfound independence at risk…

The Biographer's Tale

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover. How can you describe a ‘whole life’? Booker Prize-winner A. S. Byatt conjures a sparking, colour-filled novel about one man’s attempt to do so

Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student, decides to immerse himself in the messiness of ‘real life’ by writing a biography of a great biographer. But a ‘whole life’ is hard to find. Everywhere he looks he discovers only fragments – strange notes, boxes of marbles, undated postcards. 
 
As Phineas’s research continues, his mind roams from the deserts of Africa to the maelstroms of the Arctic. Along the way he meets others building wholes from bits and pieces – taxonomists, ecologists, even travel agents – and begins to puzzle out his future. But who will guide him from the labyrinth and back into his own life?

The Game

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover. The bond between two sisters becomes strained when a mutual love from their past comes back into their lives

One of our finest living novelists, who manages to tease and to satisfy both the intellect and the imagination

Cassandra is an Oxford don; Julia, her sister, a bestselling novelist. They share a set of disturbing memories of a strange childhood game and of Simon, the handsome young neighbour who loved them both. 
 
Years later Simon re-enters their lives via a television programme on snakes and intrudes into their uneasy compromise of mutual antagonism and distrust. The old, wild emotions surge back, demanding and urgent, and this time the game is played out to a fatal finish.

Selected Writings

Passions Of The Mind

'Erudite, magisterial and often moving, her essays are fascinating both as enthusiasms, and as a kind of codicil to her development as a novelist' - Independent

The great merit of Byatt's writing - fiction and essays - is that it continually engages the reader's mind... an enriching book, full of essays to which I expect to find myself returning again and again

A collection that traces the development of Byatt's mind and ideas over 20 years... accessible to anyone interested in literature, ideas or Byatt

In Passions of the Mind, A.S. Byatt writes as an artist and scholar taking the reader on a journey of discovery as she explores the ideas, images and attitudes to language underpinning some of her own fiction, and also the work of Great Victorians and a varied range of twentieth-century women writers. 
 
Fascinated by the coincidence of the symbolic and real which she finds in her favourite writers – Robert Browning, George Eliot and Wallace Stevens – A.S. Byatt also celebrates this quality in the sun and shadows of Van Gogh's painting.

Portraits In Fiction

A lively, fascinating and sumptuously illustrated exploration of the links between fiction, writers of fiction and portraits by one of the most admired writers of modern fiction.

Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A. S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways to the art of Cézanne. A portrait can defy the process of age but its very stillness can also seem like death. Art can be a murderer. And sometimes, as in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, a portrait can itself become the victim of Gothic rage.

The Children's Book

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover, a marvellous and gripping novel of family secrets, art and society by the author of Possession

Intricately worked and sumptuously inlaid novel...seethes and pulses with an entangled life, of the mind and the senses alike. Colour and sensation flood Byatt's writing...she is a master-potter, or magic-working puppeteer

Superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip...sizzling with ideas and alive with imaginative energy, too...this is the most stirring novel AS Byatt has written since Possession

It's success is as a novel of ideas, forcefully and often memorably expressed, while the story follows darkening fortunes into a chastened postwar world

Compelling...strenuously inclusive and also tremendously enriching - an intricate tale, energetically fashioned from sturdy strands of material, by "a spinning fairy in the attic", an indefatigable storyteller

More than a novel, this is a historical primer, discursive, shimmering with colour and texture, containing stories within stories and giving walk-on parts to luminaries of the age... For fans of Byatt this is better than Possession. A truly great novel

Light and lustrous, commanding and transporting, The Children's Book is superb

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. 
 
They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children's book.

A Whistling Woman

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover. As Frederica embarks on a new career in London, tumultuous events are unfolding in her home county of Yorkshire

Full of new energy and a sense of new directions... The plot has a driving ferocity, the huge and extraordinary cast marshaled with exceptional dexterity

In this concluding installment [of her quartet of novels], Byatt blends her own excitement at 'intellectual curiosity of any kind' with a lucid narrative and gripping plot... I suspect her fans will be hoping for a fifth

An intellectual adventure full of energy and vitality [with] solid delights, keen and demanding pleasure

Rich in metaphor and glancing allusion... Predominantly a novel of ideas. It makes a fine conclusion to the quartet

Brilliant and densely written...it's an absorbing read

A vast, intricate and highly readable tale of intellectual curiosity spanning the tensions between ideas and religion, science and television, anarchy and the intellectual establishment, the counterculture and academia, visionaries and madness The hothouse atmosphere of experimentation and the quest for new ways of seeing and being is tackled with questioning perception.

It is 1968 and Frederica Potter is surprised to find herself embarking on a new career in television. While she endeavours to navigate this fast-paced and occasionally bewildering industry, her lover John takes up a post working with a pair of unusual scientists. Yet in Frederica’s home county of Yorkshire, tumultuous events are unfolding. Soon her future, and that of the people closest to her, begins to look rather different. 
 
THE FOURTH FREDERICA POTTER NOVEL

The Virgin in the Garden

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover, the first Frederica Potter novel follows our heroine as she searches for freedom and begins a love affair

Large, complex, ambitious, humming with energy and ideas... A remarkable achievement

Comic, well plotted, immensely touching... Gaudy excitement and splendour

An ambitious novel [whose] narrative everywhere displays knowledge and intelligence

In Yorkshire, the Potter family are preparing to celebrate Elizabeth II’s arrival on the throne. Its three youngest members, however, are preoccupied with other matters. Stephanie has grown tired of their overbearing father and resolves to marry the local curate. Anxious teenager Marcus gains a new teacher and suffers increasingly disturbing visions. Then there is Frederica. On the brink of adulthood, a love affair with a young playwright may offer the freedom she desperately desires. 
 
THE FIRST FREDERICA POTTER NOVEL

Still Life

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover. Frederica arrives at university, but she is not prepared for a horrifying event that will soon change her life forever

Marvellous... A major novel, inspiring laughter and tears

Glorious… Frederica is a magnificent creation; awkward, fierce, intellectually voracious and sexually inexperienced

Francesca Segal, author of The Awkward Age

Byatt is a wonderful writer, constantly engaging wherever she takes us

Frederica Potter arrives at Cambridge University greedy for knowledge, sex and love. It isn’t long before she becomes infatuated with a mysterious and controlling poet. Back in Yorkshire, her sister Stephanie abandons academia and is confronted with the boredom and frustrations of motherhood. Meanwhile, their younger brother Marcus begins to recover from a nervous breakdown. Each sibling is desperate to shape their own future, but a horrifying event will soon change their lives forever.

Babel Tower

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover. Frederica endures the breakdown of her marriage and becomes embroiled in a high-profile court case

Tartly funny, emotionally engrossing and headily intelligent

A formidable feast of a book... A. S. Byatt can use her extraordinary mind to probe passional conflicts more hair-raisingly well than any thriller-writer

In this exuberant and vastly ambitious novel, A. S. Byatt has made both an intellectual chronicle and an intimate history... This book is about the life of art and the art of living, and its prose is charged with powerful images

A remarkable book, of exceptional gravity and serious charm... it balances an acute sense of the values of art and intellect with an imaginative sympathy. Its ambition is almost unique in the English novel

After her husband becomes violent, Frederica Potter flees with her young son to London. There, she secures a teaching position in an art school, and finds herself surrounded by painters and poets with dreams of rebellion. Then Frederica meets Jude Mason, the strange and charismatic author of a wildly controversial novel. When her husband files for divorce and Jude becomes the target of a high-profile court case, Frederica’s life threatens to spiral out of control. 
 
THE THIRD FREDERICA POTTER NOVEL

Fortuny and Morris in Life and at Work

Peacock and Vine

This enchanting essay, glowing with colour, unlocks the lives, passions and designs of two charismatic artists, Mariano Fortuny and William Morris

Byatt's latest offering is a slender but deliciously rich meditation on two artists who blurred the boundary between art and craft

A shimmering book… All admirers of AS Byatt's writing are aware of her profound intellectual awareness of the visual coexisting with an almost childlike delight in the colours and tactilities of everyday life... This is a small book but, in its enchanting way, it brings together so many of the themes of Byatt's larger and more obviously ambitious work. [...] Through concentrating on the interlocking worlds of Morris and Fortuny she makes a great defence of the values of art.

Charming... A. S. Byatt outlines the lives and passions - both intellectual and romantic - of two multitalented artist-designers who have captured her imagination

Compact, beautifully illustrated... Byatt teases out connections between [these two artists], using Fortuny to reimagine Morris and vice versa... [Her] short but luminous book is a celebration of the arts they practised

Filled with lovely images .... Byatt shows in her latest book, with her characteristic literary panache, these two titans of decoration and design had much in common, and the study of one brings into better relief the work of the other

A fascinating read. A.S. Byatt has limned mini-biographies of both artists, drawing illuminating comparisons and contrasts between them ... Not only a pleasure to peruse, it will send its readers to libraries and museums to find out more about these two talented and immensely energetic men ... This is a book to enjoy, to think about, and to present to others as a gift

Peacock and Vine is a very personal exploration of visual pleasure. The book is, accordingly, small and precious, its pages waxy and illustrations lush

A thoughtful exercise in parallel biography... by putting Morris and Fortuny side by side, Byatt celebrates their differences as much as their surprising affinities

Beautifully produced little book…heavy with sensory perceptions. She mixes biographical details with accounts of their houses and luscious descriptions of the beautiful things that they made.

Her fictions swarm with physical objects of intense emotional potency and with characters whose lives they touch in strange and unexpected ways… In this brilliant and tenderly observant little book, with its elegant Gill typeface and handsome colour illustrations, she [Byatt] celebrates the fruits of making and looking.

[A] faceted gem of a book… An ingenious comparison.

A lavishly illustrated blend of travelogue and art history.

Persuasively argued ... Abundant illustrations ... Byatt is an unabashed enthusiast of both her subjects, and her passion for their work enlivens every sentence of her text

Peacock &amp; Vine could be considered Ms. Byatt’s meditation on tradition and the individual talent – Morris’s, Fortuny’s and her own.

A hymn to its subjects. It is much wilder, richer and more evocative – a paean of praise to the imagination of the inventor…and to the beauty of meticulous and absorbing work.

The charm of Peacock &amp; Vine, lies in us overhearing a writer letting us in on her dialogue with past creators, her unravelling of them the inevitable material for our unravelling of her.

[Byatt] teases out their affinities and differences with nuance, offering readers a vivid sense of her own appreciation of art and craft along the way.

A lovely little monograph… As pleasing to hold as it is to look at, Peacock &amp; Vine brings together the English artist William Morris (1834-1896) with the Spanish-born artist and designer Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949) in an act of vivid imaginative engagement.

This ravishing book opens a window onto the lives, designs, and passions of two charismatic artists. Born a generation apart, they were seeming opposites: Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish aristocrat thrilled by the sun-baked cultures of Crete and Knossos; William Morris, a British craftsman, in thrall to the myths of the North. Yet through their revolutionary inventions and textiles, both men inspired a new variety of art, as vibrant today as when it was first conceived. Acclaimed writer A.S. Byatt traces their genius right to the source. 
 
The Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in Venice is a warren of dark spaces leading to a workshop where Fortuny created his designs for pleated silks and shining velvets. Here he worked alongside the French model who became his wife and collaborator, including on the ‘Delphos’ dress – a flowing gown evoking classical Greece. 
 
Morris’s Red House, outside London, with its Gothic turrets and secret gardens, helped inspire his stunning floral and geometric patterns; it also represented a coming together of life and art. But it was Kelmscott Manor in the English countryside that he loved best – even when it became the setting for his wife’s love affair with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 
 
Generously illustrated with the artists’ beautiful designs – pomegranates and acanthus, peacock and vine – A.S. Byatt brings the visions and ideas of Fortuny and Morris dazzlingly to life.

Possession

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.

Possession is eloquent about the intense pleasures of reading. And, with sumptuous artistry, it provides a feast of them

When mild-mannered and unremarkable academic Roland Mitchell stumbles upon a letter written by Victorian poet Randolph Ash to a mysterious woman with whom he seems to be infatuated, he is determined to uncover the truth. 
 
Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, Possession defies categorization. Rich in symmetry and symbolism, brimming over with myth, poetry and fairy tale, Byatt's masterpiece is part literary detective story, part academic satire and part historical novel. At its heart, however, is a compelling romance that draws the reader into the mirrored worlds of two couples, past and present, and explores the nature of obsession, possession and love.

A Stone Woman (Storycuts)

A woman undergoes an extraordinary physical transformation after the death of her mother.

Following the death of her mother, an elderly woman begins to undergo a transfiguration. Her body grows flinty, toughens and crystallises. An Icelandic stonemason she meets in a graveyard becomes her sole confidant. As her inexorable metamorphosis continues, the stories he has to tell of his homeland and its legends begin to resonate. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

Body Art (Storycuts)

The arrival of a young art student leads Damien to question his atheist convictions.

Damien, a gynaecological consultant and lapsed Catholic, replaces Christian icons with modern art; he worships the absence of God in the abstract staining of paint and ink. But when a vagrant young art student shows up in the ward, he once more has cause to question his personal and aesthetic convictions. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

Raw Material (Storycuts)

A creative writing teacher meets a student who plumbs a murky past for inspiration

A downtrodden creative writing teacher despairs at the efforts of his students, at turns nakedly autobiographical or fanciful beyond reason. When an elderly lady begins submitting work in accordance with his 'write what you know' directive, his enthusiasm for the craft re-emerges. However some sources are best left unexplored. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

The Pink Ribbon (Storycuts)

A couple trying to cope with the fall-out from dementia welcome an upset guest into their home

It has been five years since Madeleine has recognised her husband James. As she drops deeper into her dementia, their lives fill up with the ghosts of her past and of Blitz-era London. When late one night his loneliness causes him to welcome a distressed young lady into their home, he must re-evaluate his perspective. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

The Thing in the Forest (Storycuts)

Two middle-aged women return to the forest where they encountered something terrifying as children.

Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two little girls, extracted from their homes in wartime London, encounter something terrifying in a forest. Later when they meet as grown women, they realise the experience has coloured their lives. A dark tale about the nature of stories themselves. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

A. S. Byatt

Teeming with more ideas than a year's worth of ordinary novels

This is a novel for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take-no-prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable supernatural mystery. You turn the last page feeling stunned and elated, happy to have had the chance to read it

As always, Byatt wields beautiful prose, and the mix of prose and poetry gives the book a sensuality as mysterious as anything in the plot

Intelligent, literary, and ambitious...combines the drive of the thriller with the 19th-century novel, and throughout she threads the poetry and passion of ''romance''....races to a riotous final scene of storms and graveyards

Proves that a serious, intricate book can also be a page turner...manifest intelligence, subtle humor and extraordinary texturing of the past within the present make Possession original and unforgettable

Shimmers with something close to genius ... If I become famous enough to be the castaway on Desert Island Discs, this is the book I'd choose. It requires effort but, trust me, it is a modern masterpiece

[AS Byatt’s] exhilarating genius came into its own with Possession

Possession perfectly demonstrated that she was more than capable of humour and of spinning the sort of yarn that would keep her readers feverishly turning the pages

A novel in which Byatt’s heady talent triumphantly comes into its own

A Romance

A romance, a literary quest, a modern classic. 
 
‘Possession is eloquent about the intense pleasures of reading. And, with sumptuous artistry, it provides a feast of them’ Sunday Times 
 
A pair of young scholars investigate the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time. Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. 
 
‘Exhilarating genius’ Guardian 
 
**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE**

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A. S. Byatt

Praise for Possession

A triumphant success on every level

Teeming with more ideas than a year's worth of ordinary novels

This is a novel for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take-no-prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable supernatural mystery. You turn the last page feeling stunned and ...

A triumphant success on every level

Teeming with more ideas than a year's worth of ordinary novels

This is a novel for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take-no-prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable supernatural mystery. You turn the last page feeling stunned and ...

A triumphant success on every level

Teeming with more ideas than a year's worth of ordinary novels

This is a novel for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take-no-prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable supernatural mystery. You turn the last page feeling stunned and ...

Books by A. S. Byatt

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The Frederica Potter Novels

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