The Children's Book
  • Published: 1 October 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099535454
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 624
  • RRP: $27.99
Categories:

The Children's Book

Formats & editions
EBook
1 May 2010
Paperback
1 Oct 2010
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Reissued with a beautiful new illustrative cover, a marvellous and gripping novel of family secrets, art and society by the author of Possession

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets.

They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children's book.
  • Published: 1 October 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099535454
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 624
  • RRP: $27.99
Categories:

About the author

A S Byatt

A.S. Byatt is 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.

portrait photo of A S Byatt

Also by A S Byatt

Possession
Medusa’s Ankles
Peacock and Vine
The Pink Ribbon (Storycuts)
Raw Material (Storycuts)
Body Art (Storycuts)
A Stone Woman (Storycuts)
See all

Praise for The Children's Book

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

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

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
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