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Sign up todayA Whistling Woman
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Learn moreThis triumphant conclusion to A. S. Byatt's great quartet of postwar English life and manners stands on its own as a magical and thought-provoking novel of ideas made flesh.
Frederica, the spirited heroine of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower, falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, while tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to split her world. In the late 1960s, the languages of religion, myth, and fairy tale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. The meaning of love itself seems to vanish and people flounder, often comically, while searching for their true sexual, intellectual, and emotional identities.
Through her wayward, lovingly drawn characters and breathtaking twists of plot, A. S. Byatt illuminates the effervescence of intellectual and social life in 1960s Britain.
A. S. Byatt was educated at York and at 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 is a distinguished critic and reviewer as well as a novelist.
Pamela Garelick was born in England. She acted in fringe theater there before coming to the United States, where she has worked as a voice-over artist in television and radio and as an audiobook narrator. Now living and working in Greece, she records, translates, and edits voice-overs from all over the world as well as narrating audiobooks in a small studio in her Mediterranean garden. She also paints silk clothing, bakes for the local cafés, and teaches newcomers the Greek language.
Reviews
“A bold, brainy eulogy to the late ’60s…Byatt’s clashes between the intimate and the intellectual make for a raucous, lively work.”
“Rich, acerbic, wise…[Byatt] tackles nothing less than what it means to be human.”
“With consummate skill and inventiveness, [Byatt] creates a large cast of characters who shine with intelligence and individuality.”
“Rich in metaphor and glancing allusion, it is a tale of learning and anti-learning, sects and cults, the complex sexual relationships of humans and snails...A Whistling Woman, like its predecessors, is predominantly a novel of ideas. Not about politics, foreign or domestic, but about philosophy, psychology and literature; the excitement of genetics and computer science edging towards their breakthrough.”
“Byatt, like George Eliot and Doris Lessing, aims to show in her fiction the exemplary struggle between self-consciousness and the precepts of culture…a beautifully realized, smart novel.”
“Gloriously complex, extraordinarily dramatic, and diabolically clever, Byatt's tour de force, a descendant of Shakespeare, Milton, George Eliot, and Lewis Carroll, is fueled by penetrating inquiries into the nature of story and metaphor, the workings of the mind, and the mystery of love.”
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