" It is a great, shaggy, generous, polysyllabic, triple-decker beast of a book and I haven' t read anything in an age I' ve enjoyed so much. Nor have I sat into the small hours turning the pages of a manuscript in execrable computer print, with such risk to my eyes, already weakened, weakened still further by the Swiss lights because I simply had to get to the end of it. It is the mixture of ideas, cunning, fairy tales, humour - the clever way she interweaves natural history, romance, poems, porches, table tapping and even, I think, Rapunzel; and it is also so funny, in two centuries, at once! I believe it' s the best thing she has done. Christabel and Ash, Roland and Maud come off the page bewitchingly." -- Christopher Hope
" A massive, complex story about a literary mystery which turns into an emotional voyage of discovery... The novel is a triumphant success on every level - as a critique of Victorian poetry, an unbearably moving love story and a satire on the modern ' Biography Industry' ." -- "Cosmopolitan"
" Byatt has contrived a masterly ending to a fine work; intelligent, ingenious and humane, Possession bids fair to be looked back upon as one of the most memorable novels of the 1990s." -- "TLS"

A. S. Byatt was educated in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge, and taught at the Central School of Art before becoming a full-time writer. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.