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Selected Stories from the Booker Prize Winner

Medusa’s Ankles

A luminous single-volume selection of short stories from the Booker prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt

A luminous selection of short stories from the Booker prize-winning A. S. Byatt, celebrating over thirty years of writing 
 
With an introduction by David Mitchell 
 
Byatt takes her readers to a place that is rich in ideas, vivid in colour and wholly unforgettable. Mirrors shatter at the hairdressers when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real. 
 
Peopled by artists, poets and fabulous creatures, these stories travel from the ancient mythic world to an English sweet factory, a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace. Blazing with creativity, they show what lies beneath the veneer of the ordinary, and reveal the fantastical possibilities beyond. 
 
'A cabinet of curiosities... Glitteringly beautiful' Sunday Times 
 
'A cerebral extravaganza, bristling with ideas' Spectator 
 
'Moving, witty and shocking' Sunday Telegraph

It was a pleasure to be reacquainted with 'Medusa's Ankles'... There's an echo of Iris Murdoch here, herself the subject of several books by Byatt

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL 
 
Mirrors shatter at the hairdressers when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real. 
 
Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and travel from Ancient myth to an English sweet factory, a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, a Turkish bazaar to a fairytale palace. 
 
Driven by curiosity, Byatt takes her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary and the gloss of the fantastical, to a place rich in ideas, vivid in colour and wholly unforgettable. 
 
'A cabinet of curiosities... Glitteringly beautiful. Byatt is a vivid colourist' Sunday Times 
 
'A cerebral extravaganza, bristling with ideas' Spectator 
 
'These little stories by one of Britain's foremost grandes dames of the writing world are a delightful surprise, packing a much greater punch than many full-length novels... They are moving, thought-provoking, witty and shocking all at once' Sunday Telegraph

Angels And Insects

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover, two magical and timeless novellas from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession

Like A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, these two mesmerising novellas are set in the nineteenth century. In Morpho Eugenia, an explorer realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In The Conjugal Angel, curious individuals – some fictional, others drawn from history – gather to connect with the spirit world. Throughout both, Byatt examines the eccentricities of the Victorian era, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance, science and faith into a sumptuous, magical tapestry.

A Novel

The Shadow of the Sun

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover, A.S. Byatt’s debut novel – the moving story of a young woman’s struggle for independence and identity

It is the height of summer. After she is expelled from boarding school, Anna Severell returns to the strict, orderly house of her father, a celebrated novelist. The family is soon joined by Oliver Canning, a talented young academic who urges her to take control of her future. As autumn begins and Anna enters university, the pair grow closer. A single mistake, however, could put her newfound independence at risk…

The Biographer's Tale

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover. How can you describe a ‘whole life’? Booker Prize-winner A. S. Byatt conjures a sparking, colour-filled novel about one man’s attempt to do so

Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student, decides to immerse himself in the messiness of ‘real life’ by writing a biography of a great biographer. But a ‘whole life’ is hard to find. Everywhere he looks he discovers only fragments – strange notes, boxes of marbles, undated postcards. 
 
As Phineas’s research continues, his mind roams from the deserts of Africa to the maelstroms of the Arctic. Along the way he meets others building wholes from bits and pieces – taxonomists, ecologists, even travel agents – and begins to puzzle out his future. But who will guide him from the labyrinth and back into his own life?

The Game

Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover. The bond between two sisters becomes strained when a mutual love from their past comes back into their lives

One of our finest living novelists, who manages to tease and to satisfy both the intellect and the imagination

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 finish.

Selected Writings

Passions Of The Mind

'Erudite, magisterial and often moving, her essays are fascinating both as enthusiasms, and as a kind of codicil to her development as a novelist' - Independent

The great merit of Byatt's writing - fiction and essays - is that it continually engages the reader's mind... an enriching book, full of essays to which I expect to find myself returning again and again

A collection that traces the development of Byatt's mind and ideas over 20 years... accessible to anyone interested in literature, ideas or Byatt

In Passions of the Mind, A.S. Byatt writes as an artist and scholar taking the reader on a journey of discovery as she explores the ideas, images and attitudes to language underpinning some of her own fiction, and also the work of Great Victorians and a varied range of twentieth-century women writers. 
 
Fascinated by the coincidence of the symbolic and real which she finds in her favourite writers – Robert Browning, George Eliot and Wallace Stevens – A.S. Byatt also celebrates this quality in the sun and shadows of Van Gogh's painting.

A. S. Byatt

[AS Byatt’s] exhilarating genius came into its own with Possession

Possession perfectly demonstrated that she was more than capable of humour and of spinning the sort of yarn that would keep her readers feverishly turning the pages

A novel in which Byatt’s heady talent triumphantly comes into its own

A Romance

A beautiful hardback edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel. A romance, a literary quest, a modern classic. 
 
A pair of young scholars investigate the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time. Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. 
 
‘Exhilarating genius’ Guardian 
 
‘Possession is eloquent about the intense pleasures of reading. And, with sumptuous artistry, it provides a feast of them’ Sunday Times 
 
**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE** 
 
VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

Possession

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A. S. Byatt

Praise for Possession

[AS Byatt’s] exhilarating genius came into its own with Possession

A literary blockbuster

Possession perfectly demonstrated that she was more than capable of humour and of spinning the sort of yarn that would keep her readers feverishly turning the pages

[AS Byatt’s] exhilarating genius came into its own with Possession

A literary blockbuster

Possession perfectly demonstrated that she was more than capable of humour and of spinning the sort of yarn that would keep her readers feverishly turning the pages

[AS Byatt’s] exhilarating genius came into its own with Possession

A literary blockbuster

Possession perfectly demonstrated that she was more than capable of humour and of spinning the sort of yarn that would keep her readers feverishly turning the pages

Books by A. S. Byatt

Series by A. S. Byatt

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics169 Books

The Frederica Potter Novels4 Books

Articles featuring A. S. Byatt

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