The Children's Book (Hardcover) ~ A. S. Byatt (Author) Cover Art

The Children's Book (Hardcover)

By: A. S. Byatt (Author)

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Review

"Byatt is brilliant on the gathering forces of England and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, their contrasting attitudes towards the part that the land plays in the collective unconscious, their differing forms of nostalgia....[She] reminds us in chilling fashion of the perils of artistic creation, and the duties of its exponents to find out the difference between what is real and what is not."

"For all of its more than 600 pages it is rarely less than totally absorbing--and often very moving. The novel brings together many of the interests that have been played out in Byatt's work over the years: the historical novel, fairy tales, the visual arts, the question of what it is to be a writer. But perhaps what sets it apart from some of her other work is that it feels personal and heartfelt, and many of the novel's strands seem to evoke Byatt's own life."

"A.S. Byatt's hugely ambitious new novel....is an eloquent testament to the dangerous power of both art and myth."

"THE CHILDREN'S BOOK is mind-boggling in ambition, a mesmerizing exploration of, well, everything....Rich with period detail and sublime storytelling, A.S. Byatt's supremely fulfilling new novel is fat, busy and wondrous, jammed with a staggering amount of history, with characters and ideas that demand attention and threaten to overwhelm even the most avid reader. Only they don't."

"Byatt has an almost hallucinatory gift for physical description....[She] is a prodigious, even compulsive, conjurer of worlds within worlds, and THE CHILDREN'S BOOK bulges with descriptions of puppet shows, stage plays, art exhibitions and craft camps..."

"Byatt has constructed a complete and complex world, a gorgeous bolt of fiction....[T]he magic is in the way Byatt suffuses her novel with details, from the shimmery sets of a marionette shows to clay mixtures and pottery glazes."

Publisher's note

A tale spanning from the Victorian era through World War I finds famous children's book author Olive Wellwood taking in a runaway who reminds her of her own characters and exposing the boy to dark truths about her family's summer bacchanals at their rambling country house. By the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of "Possession, "a dazzling new novel that spans the years from the Victorian era through World War I 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 Victoria and Albert Museum--a 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 midsummer bacchanals the Wellwoods host at their rambling country house--and the private books that Olive 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 is slowly uncovered. Yet a far larger danger awaits: the Great War lies ahead, and it will leave no one unscathed.
Suspenseful, seductive, at once sweeping and intimate, "The Children's Book "is a masterly literary achievement by one of our most essential writers.

Annotation

A.S. Byatt has crafted a landmark novel of Europe at the turn of the 20th century, centered on a children's book writer whose eerie fables and fairy tales reflect the dark secrets hidden in her family's history. In 1895, Olive Wellwood seems to be living an idyllic existence--she is married to a pillar of Victorian society, pregnant with her seventh child, and working diligently on her popular series of children's books. But Olive's artistic endeavors are filled with hints of sorrow and regret which gradually push towards the surface, and this pseudo-exposure has its own dark effects on her neglected children, resulting in a relentless cycle of almost masochistic anguish. These subliminal distress signals are broadcast more explicitly in the works of the Fludds, another family of artists in the Wellwoods' social circle, whose fate is intricately linked to the Wellwoods by chains of sex, pain and creativity. As global forces collide in the first World War, Byatt's vast menagerie of characters must chose how to participate in an event where the suffering is certain to be more overt than they are used to. The erudite Byatt has outdone herself with this historical epic, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

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