Possession (film Tie-in)

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize and the 1990 Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize -- soon to be a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle and Trevor Eves, and directed by Neil LaBute.
Hailed by "The New York Times Book Review" as " a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and " a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights, " A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. "Time" magazine calls her " a novelist of dazzling inventiveness."

Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. " On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession -- the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject -- she is profound, " said "The Sunday Times" (London). The "New Yorker" dubbed it " more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve and] monstrous richness of detail make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics -- Roland Michell and Maud Bailey -- as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.