A darkly comic novel about class, the long shadow of war, and unrequited first love
The Booker Prize 1990
Possession took on new meaning when AS Byatt announced that she would spend the prize money, won with Possession, on a swimming-pool for her house in the South of France.
Hilary Mantel was one of the judges who awarded Byatt the prize, little knowing that in 2009 they would be on the same shortlist together. Possession is a big, complex book about two modern historians trying to uncover the relationship between a pair of Victorian poets.
Metafiction sometimes has a dubious reputation but here Byatt used it with rare adroitness, although it proved rather too testing for the film adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart.
Possession
Winner of The Booker Prize 1990
- By
- A.S. Byatt
- Published by
- Chatto & Windus
The winner of the 1990 Booker Prize. Two modern-day academics uncover a secret affair between famous fictional poets in A.S. Byatt’s gloriously exhilarating novel of wit and romance
The shortlist
The winner of the 1990 Booker Prize. Two modern-day academics uncover a secret affair between famous fictional poets in A.S. Byatt’s gloriously exhilarating novel of wit and romance
By A.S. Byatt
In Penelope Fitzgerald’s historical novel, two strangers wake up in the same bed after a bicycle crash. Complications ensue, of both heart and head
In John McGahern’s deeply affecting Irish family drama, an old man struggles to keep pace with the bewildering passage of time
Brian Moore’s tense drama focuses on the personal effects of The Troubles, the period of conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to 1998
By Brian Moore
An alcoholic writer pursues his long-standing obsession with the bizarre and colourful Gursky family, in Mordecai Richler’s rollicking tour de force
