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Shop nowAngels & Insects
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Learn moreIn two breathtakingly accomplished novellas, A. S. Byatt explores the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion.
In "Morpho Eugenia", a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a wealthy family and immediately falls for the eldest daughter. But before long the family's clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutable as the behavior of insects. In "The Conjugial Angel," a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by the ghost of a very real historical personage.
Angels & Insects offers further proof of Byatt's prodigious powers and magical sympathy for characters who might have been our great-great-grandparents.
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.
Wanda McCaddon (a.k.a. Nadia May or Donada Peters) has narrated well over six hundred titles for major audiobook publishers, has earned numerous Earphones Awards, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine.
Reviews
“The British novelist A. S. Byatt is a very clever woman, and Angels & Insects exhibits her cleverness.”
“Proven professional [Wanda McCaddon]...rises predictably to the challenge. Hers is a gifted storyteller’s voice, perfect for a tale of Victorian England, full of expectation and interest in the wonderments of what she has to say. Her characterizations of both males and females of varied social registers are excellent, as is her ability to transmit clearly the tonal subtexts of Byatt’s clause-laden, gracefully qualified sentences.”
“Delicate and confidently ironic.... Byatt perfectly blends laughter and sympathy [with] extraordinary sensuality.”
“Byatt effortlessly exploits the opportunities for pastiche, belletristic flourish and critical commentary. If her symbolism is as excessively upholstered and overdetermined as the narratives of her Victorian models, beneath the padding she sets out a delicate chain of thematic concerns—19th-century tensions between science and faith, erotic currents within families, the nature of marital happiness—and heightens them by juxtaposing the two novellas here. Her easy ventriloquism mocks Victorian excesses even as she uses these same elements to inveigle her readers. Complex and captivating, this fluid volume recasts itself on every page.”
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