Possession

A triumphant success on every level

Cosmopolitan

Teeming with more ideas than a year's worth of ordinary novels

Spectator

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

Washington Post

Possession is eloquent about the intense pleasures of reading. And, with sumptuous artistry, it provides a feast of them

Sunday Times

Our best novelist

Evening Standard

As always, Byatt wields beautiful prose, and the mix of prose and poetry gives the book a sensuality as mysterious as anything in the plot

Elizabeth Kostova

Intelligent, ingenious and humane

Times Literary Supplement

Intelligent, literary, and ambitious...combines the drive of the thriller with the 19th-century novel, and throughout she threads the poetry and passion of ''romance''....races to a riotous final scene of storms and graveyards

The Times

Proves that a serious, intricate book can also be a page turner...manifest intelligence, subtle humor and extraordinary texturing of the past within the present make Possession original and unforgettable

Time

Shimmers with something close to genius ... If I become famous enough to be the castaway on Desert Island Discs, this is the book I'd choose. It requires effort but, trust me, it is a modern masterpiece

Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

[AS Byatt’s] exhilarating genius came into its own with Possession

Guardian, Harriet Harvey Wood,

A literary blockbuster

Lisa Allardice, Guardian

Possession perfectly demonstrated that she was more than capable of humour and of spinning the sort of yarn that would keep her readers feverishly turning the pages

The Times

An entire and enchanted universe

Elif Shafak

A novel in which Byatt’s heady talent triumphantly comes into its own

Peter Kemp, The Times