A. S Byatt

When Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum--a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive's magical tales--she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends--a world that conceals more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined and that will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces.

Roland Michell and Maud Bailey are young academics in the 1980s researching the lives of two Victorian literary figures: the major poet Randolph Henry Ash and the lesser-known "fairy poetess" Christabel LaMotte. After coming across hints of a long-buried and potentially explosive secret in the poets' letters and journals, Maud and Roland join forces to track their subjects' movements from London to Yorkshire to Brittany, tracing clues embedded in...

The Mill on the Floss tells the story of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a pair of siblings who grow up together on a river in early nineteenth century England. While Tom's reserved nature and Maggie's idealism produce differences that strain their love in times of hardship, the two ultimately reconcile when confronted with certain death. A powerful work on individual tenacity in the face of oppressive circumstance, The Mill on the Floss remains one of Eliot's...

"A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, drawn from her entire career. Mirrors shatter at the hairdressers when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess, honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real. Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction,...

Two estranged sisters are brought by a friend back into an alternate world modeled on the landscapes of Arthurian romance that they visited as little girls.

"Henry James' celebrated novel about a passionate New England suffragette, her displaced southern gentleman cousin, and a charismatic young woman whose loyalty they both wished to possess goes so directly to the heart of sexual politics that it speaks to us with a voice as fresh and as vital as when the book was first published in 1882. Majestic in its movement, rich and sympathetic in its ironies, The Bostonians is the work of a master psychologist...

A motley assortment of characters seek peace and salvation in this early masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, The Sea 
A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly the old bell, a legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. And then things begin to change. Meanwhile the wise old...

Roland is an academic researcher who discovers some important letters written by a famous Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash. Ash was presumed to have been totally devoted to his wife, but Roland finds letters written to another unnamed woman, and soon determines that the intended recipient was another, less well-known poet, Christabel LaMotte. Roland contacts Maud, an expert on LaMotte's life and work. Despite her skepticism, the two begin to investigate,...