A. S Byatt

These two fascinating novellas, like A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, are set in the mid-nineteenth century, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance. "Morpho Eugenia" is a lively Gothic fable of the Earthly Paradise, of the Victorian obsession with Darwinian theories of breeding and sexuality and the parallels between insect and human society - the capture and taming of nature, whether it be a young woman in a country house...

A.S. Byatt's books shimmer with all the hues of her critically acclaimed talent and imagination. In The Matisse Stories, this Booker Prize-winning author offers three elegant tales that explore the subtle interplays between mind and eye, heart and hand. In the first, Medusa's Ankles, a fashionable woman watches her life take on darker, more ominous shades in the mirror of a beauty salon. In the next, Art Work, an eccentric housekeeper's alarming eye...

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....

Willa Cather's best known novel is an epic—almost mythic—story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.
In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the...

Maggie Tulliver is always in trouble. Her spirited temperament brings her into conflict with her family and she finds her own nature divided between the claims of moral responsibility and her hunger for self-fulfillment.

"A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, drawn from her entire career. 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,...

In this brilliant retelling of the Norse myth about the end of the world, the award-winning author of Possession and The Children's Book unleashes a story of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves.