Sugar and Other Stories

by A. S. Byatt

Overview

Collected in a single volume for the first time—an unforgettable book of short stories from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession that explores the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss, and the elaborate memories we construct against it. 

In this book of short fictions, A.S. Byatt compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.

"Byatt's stories display all her talents as a novelist, but spiced with an additional friskiness." —Evening Standard

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307819543
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/25/2012
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

A. S. Byatt was the author of numerous novels, including The Children’s Book, The Biographer’s Tale, and Possession, which was awarded the Booker Prize. She also wrote two novellas, published together as Angels & Insects, five collections of short stories, and several works of nonfiction. A distinguished critic and author, and the recipient of the 2016 Erasmus Prize for her “inspiring contribution to ‘life writing,’” she died in 2023.

Hometown:

London, England; France

Date of Birth:

August 24, 1936

Place of Birth:

Sheffield, England

Education:

B.A., Newnham College, Cambridge, 1957; graduate study at Bryn Mawr College and Somerville College

Editorial Reviews

In a uniquely expressive and sensuous response to life's enduring ambiguities, Byatt, author of the critically praised novel, Still Life (1985), unfolds the ll stories that make up this collection. The tales are long, for the most part, and intricately constructed, requiring a reader's full attention. In ``Precipice-Encurled'' there are intriguing glimpses of poet Robert Browning, now a widower, grappling with self-doubt in an Italian retreat, while a family to whom he is to be an honored visitor experiences a death. Mortality is the leitmotif of the title story as the death of her father in an Amsterdam hospital allows a daughter to examine with new understanding some of the family relationships. Menace is palpable in ``In the Air'' when a lonely dog walker nearly lives out her prophecy of disaster. In other stories, questions of eternity, of near- and after-death experiences, of desiring the unobtainable form a matrix of complex narrations rich in cultural allusions. For judicious readers, the literary overtones of a probing writer will provide considerable pleasure. (June 30)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Byatt's formidable intellect and fine sensibility illuminate this varied collection. The title story is dense with recollection and complexity, an intimate family history saved from sentimentality by the intricacy of its detail. In another story, the penetrable conversational border between the living and the dead is as near as ``The Next Room.'' ``The Dried Witch'' is an immersion in primitive magic, immediate and total; ``The July Ghost,'' a touching chiller. Byatt's interest in the interplay between life and art, memory and creation, the ``true moment'' and the ``storied event'' finds expression in such stories about writing as ``The Changeling,'' ``On the Day that E. M. Forster Died,'' and ``Precipice-Encurled.'' Eminently satisfying, for admirers of the excellent Still Life ( LJ 11/15/85). Mary Soete, San Diego P.L., Cal.

Library Journal

"Byatt's stories display all her talents as a novelist, but spiced with an additional friskiness ... a bright, sensual prose that seems to paint rather than describe, giving a teacup, a mountainside, or the night sky a texture and density that go beyond words on a page." —Evening Standard

From the Publisher