A.S. Byatt

Winner of England's Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a 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.

Three delightful stories inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and “a writer of dazzling inventiveness" ( Time ). "[An] exquisite triptych.... Richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people." — People These 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