Britisher A. S. Byatt wrote intellectually sharp ‘Possession’

(Current fiction and quality fiction of the past.)

Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of 1991, “Possession” (Vintage) by A. S. Byatt remains an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover 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. 

Described by the publisher as “an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story,” this tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets became a huge international seller. 

A. S. Byatt is, of course, Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE, an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper (London) named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. 

In Examiner’s opinion, her most recent novel, “Ragnarok: The End of the Gods,” published in 2011, is linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, a landmark work of fiction from one of the world's truly great writers. Also highly recommended, but read “Possession” first. 

Publishing Record 

1964 The Shadow of the Sun , Chatto & Windus 

1965 Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch , Chatto & Windus

1967 The Game , Chatto & Windus

1970 Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time, Nelson

1976 Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study, Longman

1978 The Virgin in the Garden , Chatto & Windus

1985 Still Life , Chatto & Windus

1987 Sugar and Other Stories , Chatto & Windus

1989 Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life, Hogarth Press

1990 George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (editor with Nicholas Warren), Penguin

1990 Possession: A Romance , Chatto & Windus

1991 Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings , Chatto & Windus

1992 Angels & Insects , Chatto & Windus

1993 The Matisse Stories , Chatto & Windus

1994 The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye , Chatto & Windus

1995 Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers  (with Ignes Sodre), Chatto & Windus

1995 New Writing Volume 4 (editor with Alan Hollinghurst), Vintage

1997 Babel Tower , Chatto & Windus

1997 New Writing Volume 6 (editor with Peter Porter), Vintage

1998 Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice , Chatto & Windus

1998 Oxford Book of English Short Stories (editor), Oxford University Press

2000 On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays , Chatto & Windus

2000 The Biographer's Tale , Chatto & Windus

2001 Portraits in Fiction , Chatto & Windus

2001 The Bird Hand Book  (with photographs by Victor Schrager), Graphis Inc. (New York)

2002 A Whistling Woman , Chatto & Windus

2003 Little Black Book of Stories , Chatto & Windus

2009 The Children's Book , Chatto & Windus

2011 Ragnarok: The End of the Gods , Canongate

Publish list provided by Wikipedia.

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