A novel that tells the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. 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.
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a captivating love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. 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.
‘The mix of prose and poetry gives the book a sensuality as mysterious as anything in the plot’ Elizabeth Kostova
'Intelligent, ingenious and humane' - Times Literary Supplement
'Intelligent, literary, and ambitious...combines the drive of the thriller with the 19th century novel, and throughout she threads the poetry and passion of ''romance''....races to a riotous final scene of storms and graveyards' - The Times
'You turn its last page feeling stunned and elated, happy to have had the chance to read it. This is a novel for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take no- prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable supernatural mystery that starts with an old book in a London library and ends on a storm-wracked night in a churchyard before an open grave.' - Washington Post
Author
About A. S. Byatt
A.S. Byatt is internationally known as a novelist, short-story writer and critic. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, as well as The Shadow of the Sun, The Game and The Biographer's Tale. Her latest novel, The Children's Book, is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009. She is also the author of two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of stories, and has co-edited Memory: An Anthology. 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.
