This triumphant conclusion to A. S. Byatt’s great quartet of postwar English life and manners stands on its own as a magical and thought-provoking novel of ideas made flesh.

Frederica, the spirited heroine of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower, falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, while tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to split her world. In the late 1960s, the languages of religion, myth, and fairy tale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. The meaning of love itself seems to vanish and people flounder, often comically, while searching for their true sexual, intellectual, and emotional identities.

Through her wayward, lovingly drawn characters and breathtaking twists of plot, A. S. Byatt illuminates the effervescence of intellectual and social life in 1960s Britain.

In two breathtakingly accomplished novellas, A. S. Byatt explores the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion.

In “Morpho Eugenia”, a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a wealthy family and immediately falls for the eldest daughter. But before long the family’s clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutable as the behavior of insects. In “The Conjugial Angel,” a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by the ghost of a very real historical personage.

Angels & Insects offers further proof of Byatt’s prodigious powers and magical sympathy for characters who might have been our great-great-grandparents.

A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, “a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights” (The New York Times Book Review). With an introduction by David Mitchell, best-selling author of Cloud Atlas

Mirrors shatter at the hairdresser’s 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 color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary—even beyond the gloss of the fantastical—to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.

Cover image: © 2021 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.

When Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum—a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive’s magical tales—she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends.

But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives—of adults and children alike—unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.

Taking us from the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, The Children’s Book is a deeply affecting story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day.

When they were little girls, Cassandra and Julia played a game in which they entered an alternate world modeled on the landscapes of Arthurian romance. Now, the sisters are grown and have become hostile strangers–until a figure from their past, a man they once both loved and suffered over, reenters their lives. It is the skittish, snake-obsessed Simon who draws Julia and Cassandra into his charismatic orbit…and into menacing proximity to each other, their discarded selves, and the game that neither of them has completely forgotten. What ensues is both shocking and as inevitable as a classical tragedy.

In this elegant set of stories, three modern women are touched in different ways by the paintings of Henri Matisse.

In “Medusa’s Ankles,” a distinguished translator visits a hair salon hoping to regain a hint of her youthful looks. Hung on the wall before her is one of Matisse’s iconic portraits.

In “Art Works,” the three inhabitants of one household—a generous wife, her petulant husband, and their regal housekeeper—make very different artists.

And in “The Chinese Lobster,” a self-tortured, anorexic art student confronts the smug opulence of Matisse’s nudes while pondering suicide.

In 1953, at an isolated boys’ school in the Yorkshire moors, is a young teacher, Alexander Wedderburn, whose imagination had been captured by the Queen Elizabeth of Shakespeare and Spenser and who has written an historical verse play about her. Now, suddenly, his play has been taken up by a wealthy patron of the arts who envisions its production on the most magnificent scale, for it is to be the climax of a local festival honoring the new Queen Elizabeth.

The novel holds us in suspense as it carries us to the great event of the play itself–in its Midsummer-Night’s atmosphere of dream, of magic, of transforming revelry–that will alter forever the course of all the characters’ lives.