Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction 2010.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.

An engrossing family saga set in the era of the late 19th century and up to the end of World War One. A simpler time, soon to change politically and socially, is shown to us through three families and the way the parents of each raise their children.

Synopsis

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children's book.

Reviews

'Byatt is at her brilliant best...The fantasy here is dark and frightening, going to the edge of what a child can bear. Alongside such rich, strange meat, Harry Potter starts to feel like a vanilla snack for scaredy cats Standpoint Superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip...sizzling with ideas and alive with imaginative energy, too ... this is the most stirring novel AS Byatt has written since Possession' Sunday Times

'It's success is as a novel of ideas, forcefully and often memorably expressed, while the story follows darkening fortunes into a chastened postwar world' The Times

'Compelling...strenuously inclusive and also tremendously enriching - an intricate tale, energetically fashioned from sturdy strands of material, by a spinning fairy in the attic , an indefatigable storyteller' Irish Times

'Astonishing power and resonance' Sunday Telegraph

Intricately worked and sumptuously inlaid novel...seethes and pulses with an entangled life, of the mind and the senses alike. Colour and sensation flood Byatt's writing...she is a master-potter, or magic-working puppeteer' Independent

About the Author

A. S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer and critic. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. Her most recent novel is A Whistling Woman, the conclusion of the famous 'Frederica' quartet. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation