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.

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...

Features short fictions that explore the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss and the elaborate memories we construct against it. This title compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.