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.[...]

Tells the story of a young girl evacuated to the British countryside during the Second World War. Struggling to make sense of her life, she is given a book of Norse myths, and her inner and outer worlds are transformed.[...]

As novelists become increasingly interested in history as fiction and fiction as history, this study is designed to redraw the map of the boundaries of modern fiction. In her opening essays - "Fathers", "Forefathers" and "Ancestors" - the author considers the renaissance of the historical novel.[...]

Presents a collection of Byatt stories that are by turns funny, spooky, and sad. This book includes the stories of two middle aged women who walk into a forest confronting their childhood fears and memories; of a distinguished male obstetrician and a young woman artist who have very different ideas [...]

In Vintage Living Texts teachers, students and any lover of literature will find the essential guide to the major works of A. S. Byatt. Also included is an exclusive in-depth interview with A. S. Byatt relating specifically to the novels under discussion. A. S. Byatt's themes, genre and narrative te[...]

In this sequel to "The Virgin in the Garden", Byatt illuminates the conflicts between ambition and domesticity, confinement and self-fulfilment, while providing a observation of intellectual and cultural life in England during the 1950s.[...]

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, this novel describes the romance between two 19th-century poets and the parallel relationship of their two biographers and includes passages of "Victorian verse". It is structured in the form of a literary and biographical treasure hunt.[...]

Tells the story of Anna Severell's struggle at the age of seventeen to evolve her own personality in the shadow of her father, Henry Severell, a famous English novelist.[...]

The Oxford Book of English Short Stories , edited by A. S. Byatt, herself the author of several collections of short stories, is the first anthology to specifically take the English short story as its theme. The 37 stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rangi[...]

Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is haunted persistently by the ghost of the dead baby girl whom she sacrificed, in a new edition of the Nobel Laureate's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. 25,000 first printing.[...]