return to home
 
 
Member Login
Library Login
BookBrowse Mobile facebook      twitter      Bookmark and Share      mail to a friend  Email
 
  This Week's Recommendations    |     Hardcovers Coming Soon    |     Paperbacks Coming Soon    |     Recent Hardcovers    |     Recent Paperbacks
   Genres   |    Settings   |    Time Periods   |    Themes   |    Favorites   |    Award Winners   |    Book Finder   |    Surprise Me!   |    Tag cloud
   Recent Interviews    |     All Interviews    |     Author Bios    |     Author Websites    |     Pronunciation Guide
   Free Newsletters   |    Wordplay   |    Book Giveaway   |    BookBrowse Polls   |    Literary Quotes   |    Personality Quiz   |    Gift Membership
   Recent Membership Magazines    |     Magazine Archives     |     Invite the Author    |     My Reading List    |     First Impressions    |     My Account
   Editor's Blog    |     Best Reader Reviews    |     Book News    |     Meet the Reviewers    |     Stay In Touch
   About Us   |    Tour   |    Member Benefits   |    Join   |    Gift Memberships   |    Library Subscriptions   |    FAQ   |    People Say   |    Contact Us
PLA 2010
Search BookBrowse
Suggested Links
This Book's Themes:
Free Twice-Monthly Newsletters
Things I've Been Silent About
Cheever

Win This Book!


The Last Child jacket

The Last Child
by John Hart


'An early masterpiece in a career that continues to promise great things.' - Washington Post

Enter To Win Now!


wordplay
Solve this clue:
"I A Small W"

and be entered to win....
New Author
Interviews
S.J. Parris
S.J. Parris writes about her inspiration for Heresy, which masterfully blends true events with fiction into a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.
John Hart
In a letter to his readers, John Hart talks about becoming a writer and the challenges he faced in writing The Last Child.
Adam Haslett
A conversation with Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic, a deeply affecting portrait of the modern gilded age, the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Sarah Blake
Sarah Blake talks about her inspiration for The Postmistress, set in Europe and Cape Cod in 1940.
No Stars
   Summary and Book Reviews

The Children's Book: Summary and book reviews of The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt, plus links to an excerpt from The Children's Book and a biography of A.S. Byatt.

The Children's Book The Children's Book
A Novel
by A.S. Byatt
Hardcover: Oct 2009,
688 pages.

Publication information
Read an Excerpt
Reading Guide
Reader Reviews

Author Biography
Books by this Author
Critics' Opinion:   good
Readers' Rating:  Five Stars
About BookBrowse Rankings
Buy This Book
Themes Members Only Read-Alikes Members Only Add to Reading List  Members Only BookBrowse Review Members Only
Book Summary

A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize–winning author of Possession, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.

When Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum—a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive's magical tales—she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends.

But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives—of adults and children alike—unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.

Taking us from the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, The Children's Book is a deeply affecting story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day. It is a masterly literary achievement by one of our most essential writers.

Book Reviews

Good BookBrowse - Beverly Melven
When I first plunged into The Children's Book, what struck me was how real the characters were. Olive Wellwood and her circle of friends and family didn't feel like characters, they felt like people. The expansive scope of this novel, and the attention to detail in so many areas - theater, pottery, fairy tales, anarchy, socialism and many others - is impressively handled and rarely does the history interfere with the storytelling. However, I was disappointed that the ending didn't come with a little more of the clarity and understanding I had enjoyed so much in the first part of the book.
Full Review Members Only (members only, 817 words).


Average  Publishers Weekly
The novel's moments of magic and humanity, malignant as they may be, are too often interrupted by information dumps that show off Byatt's extensive research. Buried somewhere in here is a fine novel.

Very Good  Library Journal
Starred Review. Pitch perfect, stately, told with breathtakingly matter-of-fact acuteness, this is another winner for Byatt.

Very Good  Kirkus Reviews
Ambitious, accomplished and intelligent in the author's vintage manner.

Average  The New York Times
While Byatt’s engagement with the period’s over­lapping circles of artists and reformers is serious and deep, so much is stuffed into “The Children’s Book” that it can be hard to see the magic forest for all the historical lumber — let alone the light at the end of the narrative tunnel.

Good  New Statesman
A seductive tale .... Byatt favours sexual enlightenment and social promotion and political advance in all its forms.

Very Good  The Globe and Mail
Beguiling .... Intelligent, erudite and charming .... This book made me thirsty: Whenever I put it down, it nagged me to pick it up again .... Monumental, pure, beautiful .... Byatt can still breathe magical life into historical fiction, giving her abiding interests new relevance with each work.

Very Good  The Miami Herald
Rich with period detail and sublime storytelling, A.S. Byatt's supremely fulfilling new novel is fat, busy and wondrous, jammed with a staggering amount of history, with characters and ideas that demand attention and threaten to overwhelm even the most avid reader. Only they don't.

Good  Financial Times
The sort of high-concept intellectual fiction we’d expect from, well, A. S. Byatt. Possessio: the next generation .... There is enormous personal sadness in Byatt’s novel, which becomes a collective, historical sadness as the novel moves ineluctably towards 1914.

Good  Evening Standard (UK)
The Children’s Book has a richness of pictorial décor which reminds one of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

Very Good  The Guardian (UK)
Brilliant .... Clear-eyed .... A staggeringly charged, slyly comic re-creation of the period between the end of the 19th century and the first world war.

Very Good  The Independent (UK)
Intricately worked and sumptuously inlaid .... The Children’s Book seethes and pulses with an entangled life, of the mind and the senses alike.

Very Good  The Washington Post - Keith Donohue
Bristling with life and invention, it is a seductive work by an extraordinarily gifted writer…That Byatt marries this novel of ideas with such compelling characters testifies to her remarkable spinning energy.

Very Good  The Sunday Times (London)
Easily the best thing A.S. Byatt has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece, Possession .... A panoramic cavalcade of a novel [and] a work that superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip.

Write a Review
This Book's Themes:
Read-Alikes:
Other books by this author
Buy This Book:
Addall Logo

Become a Member
Advertisement
Editor's Choice
  •  Mar 10 
  •  Mar 08 
  •  Mar 06 
36 Arguments for the Existence of God
Rebecca Goldstein
36 Arguments for the Existence of God Jacket A hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating novel about the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety.
The Unnamed
Joshua Ferris
The Unnamed Jacket What drives a man to stay in a marriage, in a job? What forces him away? Is love or conscience enough to overcome the darker, stronger urges of the natural world? The Unnamed is a deeply felt, luminous novel about modern life, ancient yearnings, and the power of human understanding.
The Bricklayer
Noah Boyd
The Bricklayer Jacket Someone gives you a dangerous puzzle to solve, one that may kill you or someone else, and you're about to fail... And there is no other option. No one who can help. No one but the Bricklayer.
Apparition & Late Fictions
Thomas Lynch
Apparition & Late Fictions Jacket Heart-rending stories of life and death: a debut fiction collection by the award-winning author of The Undertaking.
Ruby's Spoon
Anna Pietroni
Ruby's Spoon Jacket A story that feels mythical or folkloric, that is driven by a mystery, throbs with tension, and ends in conflagration. Ruby’s Spoon combines a gritty, hypervivid realism with the dreamlike richness of a fable.
The Birthday Present
Recent Reader Reviews
America's Queen by Sarah Bradford
The challenge of writing a biography on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is that everyone knows the basic plot: a love of horses, suffered from her ... read more
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
I can't quite understand the one bad review, as this is absolutely one of the best books I've read lately...and I've read plenty of good books. The ... read more
Julie & Julia by Julie Powell
Greetings everyone who goes on this website. This book was AMAZING. And I ain't no fluent reader nor spelling and writer for heaven sake I'm a ... read more
RSS RSS feed More...  
Most Viewed This Week
1. Brooklyn Bridge
Karen Hesse
2. Three Cups of Tea
David O. Relin, Greg Mortenson
3. The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
4. The Notebook
Nicholas Sparks
5. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
John Boyne
More...
Book Club Recommendations
When Will There Be Good News?
by Kate Atkinson
Paperback (Jan/10)
Remarkable Creatures
by Tracy Chevalier
Hardback (Jan/10)
Summertime
by J M Coetzee
Hardback (Dec/09)
Raven Summer
by David Almond
Hardback (Nov/09)
More...
First Impressions
Members read and review books often months before they're published. See what they think in First Impressions!
Still Life
by Melissa Milgrom
3.5 Stars            (Mar/10)
Arcadia Falls
by Carol Goodman
Four Stars            (Mar/10)
The Man From Saigon
by Marti Leimbach
4.5 Stars            (Feb/10)
The Journal Keeper
by Phyllis Theroux
4.5 Stars            (Mar/10)
Secret Daughter
by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
4.5 Stars            (Mar/10)
Heresy
by S.J. Parris
4.5 Stars            (Feb/10)
More...
   Most Recent Blog Entries
Author as Advocate
The Story Behind "The Forty Rules of Love" by Elif Shafak
A Warm Welcome to Major Pettigrew
How Becoming Published Changed My Life (in ways I did not expect)
rss  RSS   rss  subscribe
  Latest BookBrowse News
Samsung introduces eReader (Mar 10 2010)
Yesterday, Samsung announced the Samsung eReader, a $299 device which allows you to take notes in the margins and share content with other Samsung eReaders.... Full Story
Books overtake games as most numerous iPhone apps (Mar 10 2010)
The electronic book passed another milestone this month, with the number of books available on the iTunes App Store passing the number of games for the first... Full Story
rss RSS feed More...
BookBrowse Poll
Q: Which of these four elements do you tend to remember most in the books you read:
The characters
The plot
The setting
The dialogue/way characters interact
Parts of all of these
HOME Submissions | Advertising | Showcase | Library Subscriptions | Media Inquiries | Reviewers | Contact Us |   Email this page to a friend
addall.com - external link
Visit AddAll.com to compare and save at 41 bookstores!
Searching for used books? Search 20,000+ dealers!
 
Compare music prices  |  Compare movie prices
One Percent