- Published: 1 October 2010
- ISBN: 9780099535454
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 624
- RRP: $22.99
The Children's Book














- Published: 1 October 2010
- ISBN: 9780099535454
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 624
- RRP: $22.99
Intricately worked and sumptuously inlaid novel...seethes and pulses with an entangled life, of the mind and the senses alike. Colour and sensation flood Byatt's writing...she is a master-potter, or magic-working puppeteer
Boyd Tonkin, Independent
Superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip...sizzling with ideas and alive with imaginative energy, too...this is the most stirring novel AS Byatt has written since Possession
Sunday Times
It's success is as a novel of ideas, forcefully and often memorably expressed, while the story follows darkening fortunes into a chastened postwar world
Helen Dunmore, The Times
Compelling...strenuously inclusive and also tremendously enriching - an intricate tale, energetically fashioned from sturdy strands of material, by "a spinning fairy in the attic", an indefatigable storyteller
Irish Times
Astonishing power and resonance
Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph
More than a novel, this is a historical primer, discursive, shimmering with colour and texture, containing stories within stories and giving walk-on parts to luminaries of the age... For fans of Byatt this is better than Possession. A truly great novel
Daily Express
Light and lustrous, commanding and transporting, The Children's Book is superb
Daily Mail
The Children's Book beats even its predecessors
Julian Evans, Prospect
The sort of high concept rarefied intellectual fiction we'd expect from, well, A S Byatt. Posession: the next generation
Sophie Gee, Financial Times
Beautiful, bracing and bold. Her handling of dialogue is unfussy, precise and rude. This is a moving book. Its words are beautifully chosen... AS Byatt is Gaudi and Christopher Wren rolled in to one
Tom Adair, Scotsman
Extraordinary rich book is superbly embedded in the thoughts and beliefs and feelings if the period - and indeed in its interior décor
Caroline Moore, Spectator
Magnificent loquacity...gripping and often deeply affecting
Pamela Norris, Literary Review
Byatt's novel combines meaty ideas with the breathless page-turning propulsion of an old-fashioned saga... Brimming with intelligence and sensuality, this is the perfect summer book
Claire Allfree, Metro
Heartfelt and acute
Erica Wagner, The Times
Dense and intense, highly decorated and richly populated...you wonder at her thirst for reading and knowledge and desire to communicate...[and] her prodigious appetite for storytelling...remarkable, peerless, and wilfully and delightfully and unapologetically intellectual, the kind of writer who makes you marvel at what she manages to put on the page
Alan Taylor, Herald
Byatt is at her brilliant best...The fantasy here is dark and frightening, going to the edge of what a child can bear. Alongside such rich, strange meat, Harry Potter starts to feel like a vanilla snack for scaredy cats
Standpoint
It certainly compares to its popular predecessor [Possession] in daring and scope and...is its equivalent in terms of storytelling and readability. For all of its more than 600 pages it is rarely less than totally absorbing - and often very moving
Lorna Bradbury, Daily Telegraph
Byatt has not just produced an engrossing family saga but an anthem for a generation
Max Davidson, The Mail on Sunday1
You can count on A.S. Byatt to produce an engrossing saga.
Sebastian Shakespeare, Tatler
The best thing she's ever done
Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph Summer Reads
Byatt's novel - her first for seven years - is rarely less than totally absorbing and often very moving
Daily Telegraph Summer Reads
Byatt being Byatt - which is to say one of the cleverest writers of her generation - her latest novel is anything but childish... The Children's Book is one of the most grown-up you will read all year...Byatt is at her brilliant best marshalling her large cast into a series of set pieces... The personal stories are played out against a meticulously-realised bigger picture... It is in fact a sexy book, full of erotic longing patchily fulfilled. Byatt is never better than when describing Victorians trying to case of their inhibitions along with their clothes and tripping themselves up in the process... The fantasy here is dark and frightening, going to the edge of what a child can bear. Alongside such rich, strange meat, Harry Potter does indeed start to feel like a vanilla snack for scaredy cats.
Standpoint
Late in the 19th century three boys meet in what is later to become the V & A museum... Their entwined lives lie at the heart of this brilliant inquiry into art, family and morality at the turn of the century
Guardian Saturday Review, SUMMER READS
Ambition, scholarship and exquisite prose
Joanna Briscoe, Grazia
Easily the best novel Byatt has written since Possession...displays enormous reach and tremendous grip
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
Wonderfully enjoyable
Christina Koning, The Times
Enjoyable
Emily Firetog, Irish Times
Byatt's first book for seven years takes on the artistic themes of the day in exhilarating detail
Vanessa Thorpe, Observer
Majestic and immensley ambitious novel...[a] monument of a novel
Neal Ascherson, New York Review
My favourite book of 2009 for its scope, its narrative energy and its sensitivity to the strangeness of familiar-seeming things
Lawrence Norfolk, Times Literary Supplement
Totally engrossing
Lynn Roberts, The Tablet
AS Byatt's novel could surely be exhibited as a case of superlative novelistic design
Anita Sethi, Indepedent on Sunday
Magnificent, intricate novel... Byatt is an enchanter
Daily Telegraph
Imaginative brio and intellectual zest winningly combine in a book that sizzles with acute perceptions
Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times Christmas pick
Easily the best thing Byatt's written since Possession, her panoramic novel focuses on a bohemian colony of writers and potters in early 20th-century Kent
Sunday Times Summer Reading
It's absorbing, lush and full of thoughts, ideas and characters who live with you
Hannah McGill, Sunday Herald, Christmas round up