Possession: Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics

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 combination of intellectual fireworks and magnetic readability.”
 —THE GUARDIAN
 
“An altogether magical performance . . . This is a novel for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take-no-prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable supernatural mystery. You turn the last page feeling stunned and elated, happy to have had the chance to read it.”
 —THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
 
“This cerebral extravaganza of a story zigzags with unembarrassed zest across an imaginative terrain bristling with symbolism and symmetries, shimmering with myth and legend, and haunted everywhere by presences of the past . . . Possession is eloquent about the intense pleasures of reading. And, with sumptuous artistry, it provides a feast of them.”
—THE SUNDAY TIMES (London)


“Gorgeously written . . . Dazzling . . . A tour de force.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“A masterpiece of wordplay and adventure.”
 —LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“[Possession] remains one of the most popular and admired winners of the Booker Prize . . . [It] engages with its period through virtuoso re-creation of that past’s writings in multiple forms . . . The astounding mastery of Possession lies, surely, in the confidence and sweep of its construction of those Victorian voices . . . Few, if any, novels of the time approached the past with such originality and formal daring . . . English literature of the last quarter century would look very different without it.”
—from the Introduction by Philip Hensher