Babel Tower

Babel Tower

by A S Byatt (Author), A S Byatt (Author), A S Byatt (Author)

Synopsis

In BABEL TOWER a cast of striking characters play out their personal dramas amid the clashing politics, passionate ideals and stirring languages of the early 1960s. Frederica (the heroine of VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN and STILL LIFE) now teaching English in an art college, is hiding herself and her son Leo from a violent husband; her urge towards freedom later leads to an angry, humiliating divorce case. Hers is not the only struggle: her friend Jude writes a novel, BABBELTOWER, which is tried for obscenity; her brother-in-law Daniel becomes involved in new movements for London's poor and distressed. Their crises mirror those of the age - abroad, this is the decade of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the death of Kennedy; at home it is the era of the LADY CHATTERLEY case, of the Beatles, of Mods and Rockers, art school riots, the Profumo scandal. Moving and absorbing and full of comedy as well as strife, this superb novel brings our own recent past to vivid, and disturbing life.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 618
Edition: 1st
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Published: 02 May 1996

ISBN 10: 0701137185
ISBN 13: 9780701137182
Book Overview: A. S. Byatt's gripping drama of the 1960s, the third novel in the quartet which began with VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN and STILL LIFE

Media Reviews
A formidable feast of a book-A. S. Byatt can use her extraordinary mind to probe passional conflicts more hair-raisingly well than any thriller-writer Daily Telegraph In this exuberant and vastly ambitious novel, A. S. Byatt has made both an intellectual chronicle and an intimate history- This book is about the life of art and the art of living, and its prose is charged with powerful images Harpers & Queen A remarkable book, of exceptional gravity and serious charm- it balances an acute sense of the values of art and intellect with an imaginative sympathy. Its ambition is almost unique in the English novel Spectator
Author Bio
A.S. Byatt is a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the Frederica Quartet; The Children's Book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999 and is the recipient of the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her 'inspiring contribution to life writing'.