In two breathtakingly accomplished novellas, A. S. Byatt explores the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion.

Des anges et des insectes

From the booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes this richly imaginitive story collection that transports the reader to a world where oppositespassion and loneliness, betrayal and loyalty, fire and iceclash and converge.A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince, whose passionate touches scorch her delicate skin. A woman flees the scene of her husband's heart attack, leaving her entire past behind her. Striving to master color and line, a painter discovers the resolution to his artisitc problems when a beautiful and magical water snake appears in his pool. And a wealthy Englishwoman gradually loses her identity while wandering through a shopping mall. Elegantly crafter and suffused with boundless wisdom, these bewitching tales are a testament to a writer at the hieght of her powers.

Histoires de feu et de glace

Nature morte

A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.When Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum—a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive's magical tales—she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends.But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives—of adults and children alike—unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.Taking us from the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, The Children's Book is a deeply affecting story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day.

Le Livre des enfants

La destinée du jeune chercheur Roland Michell paraît étrangement liée à celle du poète victorien Randolph Henry Ash, dont il est l'un des plus grands spécialistes. Le jour où, d'un livre poussiéreux, il exhume deux lettres d'amour de l'illustre écrivain adressées à une inconnue, le cours de ses travaux - et de sa vie - est bouleversé : documents volés, amours clandestines, suicide romantique peuplent l'aventure qui dépasse bientôt le simple cadre universitaire. Couronné en 1990 par le prestigieux Booker Prize, adapté en 2002 au cinéma par Neil LaBute avec Gwyneth Paltrow et Aaron Eckhart, Possession est un récit captivant, subtil mélange d'érudition, de romance et de suspense, qui a été traduit dans de nombreux pays et a rencontré un succès mondial.

Possession

Possession is 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 séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.Man Booker Prize Winner (1990)

" Elles parlaient d'Alexander, et de leur vie. Il n'existait pas de rivalité, mais une curieuse complicité dans leur amour pour lui, probablement parce que chacune à sa manière était convaincue que c'était un amour sans espoir. L'idée qu'elle se formait de lui était celle d'un homme lointain et pur "Stephanie et Frederica n'en peuvent plus du huis clos familial où leur père fait régner une morale austère. Aussi voient-elles arriver Alexander avec ravissement. L'art, le savoir-faire, l'avenir du prestigieux dramaturge qui a mis en scène Elizabeth, la " Reine Vierge ", les transportent dans un autre monde. Marcus, leur frère, a des visions. Et, dans cette Angleterre des années 1950, chacun d'eux livre une bataille complexe et vit comme une imposture des sensations nouvelles : sexualité, succès, échec, folie, désespoir, peur de la mort...

La Vierge dans le jardin

These three stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling--about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority."Full of delight and humor...The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion."--San Francisco Chronicle

Des anges et des insectes

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