Two modern-day academics uncover a secret affair between famous fictional poets in A.S. Byatt’s gloriously exhilarating novel of wit and romance."(I)ts manifest intelligence, subtle humor and extraordinary texturing of the past within the present make Possession an original, and unforgettable, contribution. " - Paul Gray, TimeMaud Bailey is a scholar researching the life and work of her distant relative, a little-known 19th-century poet named Christabel LaMotte. Roland Mitchell is looking into an obscure moment in the life of another Victorian poet, the celebrated Randolph Henry Ash. Together, the two uncover a dark secret in Ash’s life: though apparently happily married, he conducted a torrid affair with LaMotte. As Maud and Roland dig deeper, they too find themselves falling in love."Possession is most of all about speech, language, the pleasure of reading, the singularity of reading. (...) ...Possession accomplishes its essential purpose. It makes one read and reflect on language and consider what it meant to another age." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York TimesA.S. Byatt won the Booker Prize in 1990 with Possession and was shortlisted in 2009 with The Children’s Book. Antonia Byatt published her first novel in 1964 and, apart from an interlude as an academic, has been writing them - and short stories, essays and critical appreciations - ever since. Although she is known for her high intellectualism, on winning the Booker Prize in 1990, she famously declared - with perhaps a hint of a josh - that she would spend the winnings on a swimming pool for her house in France.

Possession (Vintage International)

Possession : a romance

Byatt, A. S.

Golden Books Publishing Company, Incorporated

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Random House, Incorporated

Vintage International

Vintage Books

Everyman's library, 355, Place of publication not identified, 2012

1st Vintage International ed, New York, 1991

Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2000

United States, United States of America

Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A.S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness."???????? Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession?the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject?she is profound," said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose ... Its prankish verve (and) monstrous richness of detail (make for) a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics?Roland Michell and Maud Bailey?as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.???????? With an Introduction by the author that describes the novel's origins and its twenty-year gestation, this Modern Library edition is a handsome keepsake for fans of Possession?new and old alike

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A tale of two young scholars researching the secret love affair of two Victorian poets that's an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. “Gorgeously written ... A tour de force.” — The New York Times Book Review
Winner of England’s Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.

2021-02-06