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Little Black Book of Stories |
Five short stories, all of them very strange and very black (as the title of the book suggests). In 'Raw Material', a teacher of creative writing discovers among his ungifted pupils a Writer, but when he goes to see her, he makes a dreadful discovery... Very disturbing.
(Laurence Martin Euler - bwl 28 February 2005) |
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Possession |
Subtitled 'A Romance' this is more of a detective novel. Roland Michell, twenty-nine, is a graduate of Prince Albert College. He is studying the life of Randolph Henry Ash, an austere 19th century poet, when he finds two letters from him. After a lengthy search and a lot of help from an attractive professor at Lincoln University, he discovers a long hidden and tragic love story. Gripping.
(Laurence Martin Euler - bwl 10 August 2001) |
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The Children's Book |
Many people will love this book which charts the years between the late 1800s to WW I through the lives of an unconventional family and their English and German friends. Like a glittering kaleidoscope, the chapters dissolve one into another, revealing yet another tantalising facet of the era. There's no doubt that Byatt is a brilliant writer, although there were longueurs when I wished she would stop being brilliant and just get on with the story.
(Jenny Baker - bwl 55 Winter 2010) |
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The Virgin in the Garden - Still Life - Babel Tower |
I've just re-visited with great pleasure these three out of the intended four novels (did she ever publish the fourth?*) tracing the career of bright, spiky Frederica and her family through the 1950s and 1960s, from the new Elizabethan Renaissance to cultural chaos and the questioning of all previously held certainties. From Yorkshire to London these inter-locking stories are rich in emblematic events and characters you come to love. What a writer!
*Editor's note: A Whistling Woman is the fourth novel in the quartet.
(Annabel Bedini - bwl 35 July 2006) |
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