Ragnarok - (Canons) by A S Byatt (Paperback)

About the Book

An odyssey of childhood, mythology and the imagination from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and The Children's Book

Book Synopsis

As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. Struggling to make sense of her new wartime life, she is given a copy of a book of ancient Norse myths and her inner and outer worlds are transformed.

Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, Byatt's mesmerising tale - inspired by the myth of Ragnarok -is a landmark piece of storytelling from one of the world's truly great writers.

The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

Review Quotes

Brilliant, highly intelligent, fiercely personal . . . Gorgeous--Ursula K. Le Guin

Byatt enters with gusto and an almost Ted Hughes-like relish for savagery into this primitive world of sorcery and trickery-- "Sunday Times"

Byatt has made . . . an entire world, compressed but energetically alive in all its details. When we have artists like this, who needs gods?-- "Observer"

Byatt peels back the cover of the book that the girl reads and takes us deep inside it as she delights in reimagining the twilight of the gods and the destruction of the world . . . Like Wagner before her, she dares to dream how the world might end . . . this rewriting of the Ragnarok is a story for our time of overpopulation and anthropomorphic climate change, and of all time-- "Financial Times"

Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jewelled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in-- "Sunday Telegraph"

Byatt's prose, compact and lyrical, treats the gods with dignity . . . Ragnarok is a clever, lucid, lovely book-- "Guardian"

Byatt's retelling of Ragnarok is permeated with the loving familiarity of long acquaintance-- "Evening Standard"

Byatt's writing, impassioned and liberated from the strictures of the novel, has never been so beautiful-- "Telegraph"

Lyrical and urgent-- "The Times"

Surely among the most beautiful and incisive pages Byatt has ever written-- "Independent"

About the Author

A.S. Byatt is renowned internationally for her novels and short stories, including the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer's Tale and the Man Booker-shortlisted The Children's Book. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, she was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.