Fed up with stultifying criticism, Phineas decides to study the messiness of 'real life'. Doing nothing by halves, he sets out to write a biography of a great biographer. But a 'whole life' is hard to find. How do we put the idea of a person together? Everywhere he looks, he finds fragments and gaps[...]

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 n[...]

The magnificent title story of this collection of fairy tales for adults describes the strange and uncanny relationship between its extravagantly intelligent heroine--a world renowned scholar of the art of story-telling--and the marvelous being that lives in a mysterious bottle, found in a dusty sho[...]

An exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. This tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets became a huge bookseller favorite, and then on to national bestellerdom.[...]

A collection of short stories including subjects as diverse as memories, marriage, insects and ghosts. A.S. Byatt's other books include "Possession", winner of the 1990 Booker Prize.[...]

With a novelist's insight and eye for detail, A.S. Byatt examines the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge against the background of the great changes of their times - in society, politics, education and literature.[...]

While Frederica - the spirited heroine of "The Virgin in the Garden", "Still Life" and "Babel Tower" - falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life, and those of the people she loves. This work depicts t[...]

A novel which combines enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy. It is a tale of a brilliant and eccentric family, fatefully divided. The author won the Booker Prize and the "Irish Times"/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize in 1990 for "Possession".[...]

Reissue.

A sequel to "Virgin in the Garden" and "Still Life". A cast of characters play out their personal dramas amid the clashing politics, passionate ideals and stirring languages of the early-1960s. Their crises mirror some of the major world events of the age in which they live.[...]

The story of a lay community of mixed-up people encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns, follows the lives of Dora Greenfield, an erring wife who returns to her husband, and Michael Meade, who is confronted by his homosexual former lover. Repriint.[...]

A. S. Byatt is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed contemporary writers. This new study provides a lively and detailed exploration of her fiction and non-fiction, and examines Byatt's work in the light of postmodern concerns with language, narrative and self-referentiality. Ideal for s[...]

George Eliot's last and most unconventional novel is considered by many to be her greatest. First published in 1876, "Daniel Deronda "is a richly imagined epic with a mysterious hero at its heart.
Daniel Deronda, a high-minded young man searching for his path in life, finds himself drawn by a se[...]