National Bestseller   Winner of Englandrsquo;s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year,Possessionis an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire-from spiritualist seacute;ances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany-what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.  An exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. This tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets became a huge bookseller favorite, and then on to national bestellerdom. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

The English author of Still Life fuses an ambitious and wholly satisfying work, a nearly perfect novel. Two contemporary scholars, each immersed in the study of one of two Victorian poets, discover evidence of a previously unimagined relationship between their subjects: R. H. Ash and Christabel LaMotte had secretly conducted an extramarital romance. The scholars, ``possessed'' by their dramatic finds, cannot bring themselves to share their materials with the academic community; instead, they covertly explore clues in the poets' writings in order to reconstruct the affair and its enigmatic aftermath. Byatt persuasively interpolates the lovers' correspondence and ``their'' poems; the journal entries and letters of other interested parties; and modern-day scholarly analysis of the period. One of the poets is posthumously dubbed ``the great ventriloquist''; because of Byatt's success in projecting diverse and distinct voices, it is tempting to apply the label to her as well. Merely to do so, however, would ignore even greater skills: her superb and perpetually surprising plotting; her fluid transposition of literary motifs to an infinite number of keys; her amusing and mercifully indirect criticism of current literary theories; and her subtle questioning of the ways readers and writers shape, and are shaped by, literature. (Oct.) From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

This Booker Prize-winning novel is a good candidate for an oral reading, and Virginia Leishman performs beautifully. A wonderful mix of poetry and posturing literary criticism, part mystery, part romance, this tale is an entertaining juxtaposition of the 19th and 20th centuries. Leishman's reading emphasizes this contrast as she elegantly modulates poetry and then clips her words in a businesslike manner when reading the 20th-century analyses of 19th-century poetry. Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell, scholars of Christabel Lamotte and Randolph Henry Ash, are brought together and to life through the letters, diaries, and poetry of the two poets. Uncertain of their own identities, Bailey and Mitchell can easily lose themselves in the study of literature. We become as involved as the scholars through a judicious sampling of belles lettres and literary criticism, until finally Lamotte and Ash materialize and speak for themselves. The supporting characters are humorous stereotypes that Leishman portrays with various accents and annoying drawls to match their idiosyncrasies. Highly recommended.--Juleigh Muirhead Clark, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Lib., Williamsburg, VA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

A.S. Byatt was born on August 24, 1936 in Sheffield, England. She received a B.A. from Newnham College, Cambridge in 1957, did graduate study at Bryn Mawr College from 1957-58, and attended Somerville College, Oxford from 1958-59. She was a staff member in the extra-mural department at the University of London from 1962-71. From 1968-69, she was also a part-time lecturer in the liberal studies department of the Central School of Art and Design, London. She was a lecturer at University College from 1972-80 and then senior lecturer from 1981-83.

She became a full-time writer in 1983. Her works include The Biographer's Tale, The Virgin in the Garden, Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman, and The Children's Book. She also wrote numerous collections of short stories including Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Elementals, and Little Black Book of Stories. Byatt received the English Speaking Union fellowship in 1957-58, the Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983, the Silver Pen Award for Still Life, and the Booker Prize for Possession: A Romance in 1990.

(Bowker Author Biography) Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.