A S Byatt

A stunning collection of fairy tales for grown-ups from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession, 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). Includes the story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye"--the basis for the George Miller film Three Thousand Years of Longing starring Idris Elba and Tilda SwintonA.S. Byatt portrays the strange relationship between an intelligent heroine--a world-renowned scholar of the art of storytelling--and the marvelous being that lives in a bottle, found in a dusty shop in an Istanbul bazaar. As Byatt renders the relationship between the woman and the being with a powerful combination of erudition and passion, she makes the interaction of the natural and the supernatural seem not only convincing, but inevitable. The companion stories in this collection each display different facets of Byatt's remarkable gift for enchantment. They range from fables of sexual obsession to allegories of political tragedy; they draw us into narratives that are as mesmerizing as dreams and as bracing as philosophical meditations; and they all inhabit an imaginative universe astonishing in the precision of its detail, its intellectual consistency, and its splendor.

The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and a revered psychoanalyst team up to share their insights on six of their favorite novels. In this innovative and wide-ranging book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre bring their different sensibilities to bear on six novels they have read and loved: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Bronte's Villette, George Elliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.

Unruly Times is a superlative portrait of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a fascinating exploration of the Romantic Movement and the dramatic events that shaped it.

The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession presents an extraordinary story set against the backdrop of the 1960s--a turbulent decade of clashing politics, passionate ideals, and shifting sexual roles. At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure--the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time. We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the day seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. Peopled with weird and colorful characters, charted with brilliant, imaginative sympathy, Babel Tower is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.

From the author of The New York Times bestseller Possession, comes a highly acclaimed novel which captures in brilliant detail the life of one extended English family--and illuminates the choices they must make between domesticity and ambition, life and art. Toni Morrison, author of Beloved, writes of Byatt: "When it comes to probing characters her scalpel is sure but gentle. She is a loving surgeon".

After her husband becomes violent, Frederica Potter flees with her young son to London. 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

It should come as no surprise that short stories by the author of the magical Possession are populated by erudite paranoiacs, witches, changelings, and the ghost of a dead child.

The title story, '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 storytelling itself.

In these two "astonishing" novellas (The New Yorker), the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession returns to the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are popular manias, and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion. "At once quirky and deep, brimming with generosity, imagination, and intelligence." --The New Yorker 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.

This is the debut novel by the author of the bestselling Possession. Byatt tells the story of troubled, sensitive seventeen-year-old Anna Severell, who struggles to discover and develop her own personality in the shadow of her father, a renowned novelist. New Introduction by the Author.

The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and a novelist of "dazzling inventiveness" (Time) delivers a stunning collection of essays on literature and life. Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes a novel portraying a sibling rivalry which compels us to reconsider the uses and misuses of imagination. "Complex and thoughtful."--The Times Literary SupplementWhen 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 hostile strangers--until a figure from their past, a man they once both loved and suffered over, reenters their lives.

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.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes a wonderfully erudite novel in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably. "Large, complex, ambitious, humming with energy and ideas ... a remarkable achievement." --Iris MurdochIn 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.

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.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A tale of two young scholars researching the secret love affair of two Victorian poets that's an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. "Gorgeously written ... A tour de force." --The New York Times Book ReviewWinner of England's Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire--from spiritualist s ances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany--what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. 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. WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE

The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching' show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, while 'Woman in France' questions conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and 'Notes on Form in Art' sets out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. It also includes selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach that challenged many ideas about Christianity; excerpts from her poems; and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most challenging and rewarding of writers.

'The unity of Miss Cather's design, the clarity and distinction of this book, should put it beside her first great success, My Antonia' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'She is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers' OBSERVER 'Willa Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic' HELEN DUNMORE It is 1901, and Lucy Gayheart with her 'singular brightness of young beauty' is studying music in the magical smoky city of Chicago. She is courted by handsome Harry Gordon, the most eligible bachelor in Haverford, the Midwestern town she comes from. But Lucy falls in love with middle-aged Clement Sebastien, a famous singer whose talents and tenderness change her life forever. Out of their doomed love affair and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins, Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.First published in 1935, this novel of 'achieved simplicity' displays the depth of Willa Cather's sympathy, both for the world of high art and for the reticent decencies of small town life.