Possession Romance

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize and the 1990 Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize -- soon to be a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle and Trevor Eves, and directed by Neil LaBute. Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness." The novel traces a pair of young academics -- Roland Michell and Maud Bailey -- as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.