The Biographer's Tale - Hardcover

Byatt, A S

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701169451 ISBN 13: 9780701169459

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2000

Synopsis

In this witty, Borges-like fiction, A.S. Byatt weaves a dazzling fiction out of one man's search for fact. Fed up with stultifying criticism, Phineas G. decides to study the messiness of 'real life'. Doing nothing by halves he sets out to write a biography of a great biographer. But a 'whole life' is hard to find. How do we put the idea of a person together? Everywhere he looks he finds fragments and gaps: bones and husks, boxes of marbles, collections of coins and undated postcards. Trails run cold and mysteries are unresolved.Phineas feels he is hunting shadows. Like a shaman flying across the globe, his mind tracks the journeys of his subjects to the deserts of Africa and the maelstroms of the Arctic, where the shapes of myth meet the patterns of science. He meets others building wholes from bits and pieces: taxonomists, ecologists to travel agents offering the trip of your dreams. In the process he also puzzles out his own future - but which woman will guide him out of the labyrinth? Tantalising, comic and rueful, The Biographer's Tale is a modern delight, a colour-filled novel of detection and desire.

About this title

About the Author

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701169451
• ISBN 13: 9780701169459
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 265