A.S. Byatt – The Children's Book

Publishers Weekly“Suffers from an unaccountably large cast...” The novel's moments of magic and humanity, malignant as they may be, are too often interrupted by information dumps that show off Byatt's extensive research. Buried somewhere in here is a fine novel...

The Independent“An example of superlative novelistic design...” This is very much a novel about the importance of paying attention – not only to the grand architecture of the buildings in which we live, but crucially to the edifices of our relationships and the construction of our own thought processes...

Financial Times“High-concept rarefied intellectual fiction” What at first looks like a coincidental collection of subterranean settings turns into a vision of underground as a place of magic and terror...

The Times“A panoramic cavalcade of a novel...” Brilliantly following the trajectory that brought a civilisation and a generation to this catastrophe, The Children’s Book is a work that superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip...

Scotsman“This is a moving book...” Byatt brilliantly catches the ferment of ideas and juxtaposes it with the brief Edwardian love affair with stories and plays about children, how children are fantasised, Peter Pan being the prime example...

Book Bag“A staggering, complex and multi-layered book...” For the most part I loved it and I was deeply moved at the end. The depth of the layering of the stories and social history meant that every time I shut the book, my mind was wandering and thinking about the implications...

The New Yorker“Despite risking tedium, the book is ultimately engaging and rewarding...” Byatt is concerned with the complex, often sinister relationship between parent and child, which she explores through various works of art—pottery, puppet shows, fairy tales—using them to refract and illuminate the larger narrative...

The New York Times“A prodigious, even compulsive, conjurer of worlds within worlds...” While Byatt’s engagement with the period’s over­lapping circles of artists and reformers is serious and deep, so much is stuffed into “The Children’s Book” that it can be hard to see the magic forest for all the historical lumber...

Guardian“The danger of losing the plot...” The Children's Book is not a failure on that scale, or anything like. It contains magnificent things, but readers are entitled to feel short-changed when a family drama slowly turns into a history lesson...

The Telegraph“A rich, sprawling chronicle of characters and ideas...” Byatt is an artist of exceptional moral enchantment, but she can never quite resist the impulse to instruct, as well as beguile...