In her powerful opening essays - 'Fathers', 'Forefathers' and 'Ancestors' - A. S. Byatt considers the renaissance of the historical novel and discusses particularly the novel of wartime experience; the surprising variety of distant pasts that British writers have invented; and the new 'Darwinian novel'.

These afford new readings of writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Muriel Spark, and other contemporary authors, including Penelope Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Pat Barker.

She also offers fascinating insight into her own translation of historical fact into fiction in the two novellas which make up Angels and Insects.

Vivid, profound and full of original insights, On Histories and Stories is a riveting essay collection that redraws the map of the boundaries of contemporary fiction.

About the Author
A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was 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.

Reviews
Going from reference to reference in these glittering pages provides you with an essential reading-list for life * The Times *
Invigorating criticism * Independent on Sunday *
Biographers, as well as novelists, will find much to celebrate in a collection of essays that is so lavish with quotations from philosophers, essayists and historians... An elegant and thoughtful collection * Literary Review *
Reminds us definitively that she is not only one of our best living novelists, but one of our most astute readers, too. We are lucky to have her * New Statesman *
A rare and perhaps unique figure; a critic whose insights are full of a sympathetic, creative and re-creative imagination...The mind that produced splendid, strange fictions is also a first-rate critical intelligence... A writer of remarkable, broad sympathies * Observer *



Book Information
ISBN 9780099283836
Author A S Byatt
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 149g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 13mm