A collection of short stories including subjects as diverse as memories, marriage, insects and ghosts. A.S. Byatt's other books include "Possession," winner of the 1990 Booker Prize.

In the same format as The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, this collection deals with the themes of loyalty and betrayal, quests and longings, loneliness and passion.

As novelists become increasingly interested in history as fiction and fiction as history, this study is designed to redraw the map of the boundaries of modern fiction. In her opening essays - Fathers, Forefathers and Ancestors - the author considers the renaissance of the historical novel. She discusses in particular the novel of wartime experience; the surprising variety of distant pasts that British writers have invented; and the new Darwinian novel, stimulated in part by the discovery of DNA. These afford new readings of writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to Anthony Burgess,...

Fed up with stultifying criticism, Phineas decides to study the messiness of 'real life'. Doing nothing by halves, he sets out to write a biography of a great biographer. But a 'whole life' is hard to find. How do we put the idea of a person together? Everywhere he looks, he finds fragments and gaps. Trails run cold and mysteries are unresolved.

With a novelist's insight and eye for detail, A.S. Byatt examines the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge against the background of the great changes of their times - in society, politics, education and literature. As she charts their personal lives, traces the growth of their ideas, and shows how these are reflected in their work, readers are presented with pictures not only of the two poets themselves, but also of their families, friends and contemporaries, including Southey, de Quincey, Lamb, Hazlitt, Byron and Keats.

A new collection of Byatt stories is always a winner and never fails to delight. This one takes an unexpected turn, bringing shivers as well as magical thrills.

The Little Black Book holds its secrets, and they will linger in your mind forever. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their childhood fears and memories and the strange thing they saw -- or thought they saw -- so long ago. A distinguished male obstetrician and a young woman artist meet in a hospital. But both of them have very...

In this concluding volume Frederica falls almost by accident into a career in television in London whilst tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life.

A collection of three stories, each haunted in a different way by the spirit of Matisse, from the winner of the 1990 Booker Prize for Possession.

Yorkshire 1952. As the inhabitants of the area set about celebrating the accession of a new Queen, this is the story of an eccentric family fatefully divided. It is an entertaining tale, in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and comedy intersect richly and unpredictably.

Federica Potter plunges into Cambridge university life greedy for knowledge, sex and love. In Yorkshire her sister has abandoned academe for the cosy frustration of the family. This is the second novel in the Federica Potter quartet.