With the publication of her prizewinning fifth novel, Possession: A Romance (1990), A. S. Byatt expanded her audience from a previously small but dedicated one in Britain to a wide, enthusiastic readership on both sides of the Atlantic. A respected...

Although thus far she has written only three novels, A. S. Byatt has nonetheless achieved a distinguished place as a person of letters in the last two decades. As novelist, critic, reviewer, editor, and lecturer, Byatt offers in her work an...

Writer A.S. Byatt won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize yesterday for her fifth novel, "Possession: A Romance," a tour de force of literary mystery and invention. The Booker, which in its 21 years has become Britain's most coveted literary award, has proved to be...

PASSIONS OF THE MIND Selected Essays by A. S. Byatt Turtle Bay Books/Random House, 332 pp., $25 "I was and am excited by T. S. Eliot's observation that our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion," comments...

Reviewing Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men in today's New York Times, reviewer Michiko Kakutani laments that the novel's "lugubrious passages...gain ascendency as the book progresses." And Kakutani knows from ascendant lugubriousness. Six days earlier, the Pulitzer-winning critic labeled John Irving's latest work, Until...

Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering, from his own screenplay, very expressively projects his own feelings about the tumultuous changes taking place in the King’s Cross section in North London, under the impetus of an ambitious urban-renewal project in an immigrant-swollen area rife with crime and...

[The Virgin in the Garden] is a very good book. It is a large, complex, ambitious work, humming with energy and ideas. It is a highly intellectual operation. The characters do a great deal of thinking, and have extremely interesting thoughts which are developed at length. But this is no tract or treatise; it is a strong, confident, very long traditional novel, a remarkable achievement. At a time when some critics doom the novel to brevity, narrowness, dryness and ultimate degeneration into a 'text&#x...

The action of this careful, complex novel [The Virgin in the Garden] takes place in Yorkshire in Coronation year. Its theme is growing up, coming of age, tasting knowledge. For the leading characters 1953 becomes the year that is to define their temperaments and shape the future…. Each of the six characters caught up in these dramas is pushed to extremity, forced by change, chance and exigency to come to terms with his or her intellectual or sexual being. This is an ambitious novel, heightened by cal...

[The Game,] a deep and able book, is the sensibility romance in its more traditional guise. It not only uses but is deeply sympathetic to those sensitive personal relations, those desires for romantic redemption and for the connection of the prose and the passion, which have been part of its modern stock. The domestic-familial is the root experience, the gropings of the female spirit in adolescence the essential source of character, the search for right faith with right feeling the main line of attack. The ...