On histories and stories: selected essays

In her powerful opening essays A. S. Byatt considers the renaissance of the historical novel. She discusses particularly the novel of wartime experience; the surprising variety of distant pastas that british writers have invented; and the new "Darwinian novel",stimulated in part by the discovery of DNA. These afford new readings of writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Greene to Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Muriel Spark, and other contemporary authors, including Penelope Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, John Fuller, Hillary Mantel and Pat Barker. Byatt also offers a fascinating insight into her own translation of historical fact into fiction in the two novellas wich make up "Angels and insects".