A.S. Byatt's fairy tales and fables are among the best-loved features of her fiction. This volume contains The Glass Coffin and Gode's Tale of the Breton Baie des Trepasses, together with three other stories with medieval and oriental settings, including the title tale.

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.

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,...

In "Babel Tower" a cast of striking characters play out their personal dramas amid the clashing politics, passionate ideals and stirring languages of the early 1960s. Frederica (the heroine of "Virgin in the Garden" and "Still Life") now teaching English at an art college, is hiding herself and her son Leo from a violent husband; her urge towards freedom later leads to an angry, humiliating divorce case. Hers is not the only struggle; her friend Jude writes a novel, "Babbletower," which is tried for obscenity; her broth in law Daniel becomes involved in new movements for London's poor and...

Cassandra is an Oxford don; Julia, her sister, a bestselling novelist. They share a set of disturbing memories of a strange childhood game and of Simon, the handsome young neighbour who loved them both. Years later Simon re-enters their lives via a television programme on snakes and intrudes into their uneasy compromise of mutual antagonism and distrust. The old, wild emotions surge back, demanding and urgent, and this time the game is played out to a fatal finsih. Rich in ideas, subtle and exhilarating, "The Game" is a superb novel.

A novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets.

An alluring and atmospheric enquiry into the creative impulse -- as seen through the work and lives of Mariano Fortuny and William Morris -- by one of our greatest novelists.
This ravishing little book, glowing with colour and generously illustrated throughout, opens a window on to the lives, passions and designs of two great artists a generation apart, William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. Inspired by a vision of the aquamarine light of Venice balancing Morris's green English countryside, A.S. Byatt delves into the world-transforming magic of their art, asking what fired them, how...