A. S. Byatt

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....

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....

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children....

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....

The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye, a long story about an Englishwoman in Turkey who unwittingly releases a genie from his bottle, is a reflection on women's lives, on magic and on the power of story-telling itself....

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....

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....

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....

As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods - a book of ancient Norse myths - and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. War...

Cassandra is an Oxford don; Julia, her sister, a best-selling novelist. They share a set of disturbing memories of a strange childhood game and of Simon, the handsome young neighbour who loved them both....

A new collection of stories from A. S. Byatt is always a winner, and this one takes an unexpected turn, bringing shivers as well as delights....

The constant theme running through this collection of short stories, the first collection by A. S. Byatt, is that of repetition, taking the form of family patterns recurring across generations, the return of the past in the form of ghosts and the disruptive force of family stories....

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 finds fragments and gaps....

Each story is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling - about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being....

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....

A scholar pursues an elusive biographer, stumbling upon buried fragments of distant lives....