©Seamus Kearney
Books by A.S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a British writer and academic, who won the 1990 Booker Prize for her novel Possession, now considered a key postmodern text. Byatt published eleven novels and six collections of short fiction, including The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker and won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2010. “No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of English fiction,” declared The Paris Review in 2001, and she continues to be widely admired for her literary ambition and the grand ideas encapsulated in her fiction.
After losing her son in a tragic accident, she later explained, she lost her appetite for writing tragedy. She “slowly came to value comedy, because I began to see that tragedy and terror are things for the young, to whom nothing dreadful has happened.” In a “world of desolation and devastation,” she continued, “Why the hell not have happy endings? Everybody knows they’re artificial. Why not have this pleasure, as one has the pleasure of rhyme, as one has the pleasure of color?”
Possession: A Romance
by A.S. Byatt
🏆 Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize
Possession, a beloved literary novel which won the Booker Prize in 1990, is a two-stranded historical romance in which two 20th-century literary scholars enter a complicated relationship after the discovery of love letters in an archived text. The book features long sections of poetry—pastiches in the Victorian style, as well as letters and fictional diary entries. "I was terrified of the poems," she explained years later. "I knew I was a prose person." Ultimately, however, she found that she managed. "It really was a sort of experience of being possessed. It was an experience of all the Victorian poems that didn’t exist and should have existed suddenly crowding up like ghosts in Homer and trying to get out. There was no problem to writing any of it. I didn’t have to think about it."
“Those children, because it’s set in the Edwardian era, will grow up to live through the Great War, which is a destroyer of many things. The question then becomes: What about those glorious childhoods? What about the ones who were looking at those childhoods, appropriating those stories? In the book, many historical figures are taken and thought about — people like Kenneth Graham, Lewis Carroll, and Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout movement. We also now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that there were some dark sides to these characters…The book is very much about the dark shadows. It’s about how it is that we create lives, how it is that our well-being later on is very much shaped by that early childhood.” Read more...
The best books on Emotion and the Brain
Morten Kringelbach, Medical Scientist
Interviews where books by A.S. Byatt were recommended
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1
The Children's Book
by A.S. Byatt -
2
On the Move: A Life
by Oliver Sacks -
3
Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation
by David Huron -
4
Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life
by Steven Strogatz -
5
The Well-Tuned Brain: Neuroscience and the Life Well Lived
by Peter C. Whybrow
The best books on Emotion and the Brain, recommended by Morten Kringelbach
The best books on Emotion and the Brain, recommended by Morten Kringelbach
We live at a time of unprecedented insight into the workings of our own minds. We can use this knowledge to improve both ourselves and humanity, argues the neuroscientist.
The Best Campus Novels
Life in an academic institution can be a curiously intense experience. As a result, the hot-house atmosphere of a university campus or boarding school presents a fitting backdrop for novels exploring ambition, power dynamics, crushes, and sexual crises. Here, we’ve pulled together a list of campus novels that have been recommended on Five Books over the years, via our interviews with literary scholars, bestselling authors and book prize judges.
