Book description
Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in
different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house
near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives,
and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and
daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are
already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets.
They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the
sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent
futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be
betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the
children's book.
A. S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short
story-writer and critic. Her books include
Possession
(winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the quartet of
The Virgin
in the Garden
,
Still Life
,
Babel
Tower
and
A Whistling Woman
. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the
Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at
University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983.
She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
