A. S. Byatt

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 have become hostile strangers—until a figure from their past, a man they once both loved and suffered over...

In 1953, at an isolated boys' school in the Yorkshire moors, is a young teacher, Alexander Wedderburn, whose imagination had been captured by the Queen Elizabeth of Shakespeare and Spenser and who has written an historical verse play about her. Now, suddenly, his play has been taken up by a...

In this elegant set of stories, three modern women are touched in different ways by the paintings of Henri Matisse. In “Medusa’s Ankles,” a distinguished translator visits a hair salon hoping to regain a hint of her youthful looks. Hung on the wall before her is one of Matisse’s iconic...

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...

This triumphant conclusion to A. S. Byatt's great quartet of postwar English life and manners stands on its own as a magical and thought-provoking novel of ideas made flesh. Frederica,the spirited heroine of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower, falls almost by accident into a...

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...

A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights" (The New York Times Book Review). With an introduction by David Mitchell, best-selling author of...