Ragnarok: The End of the Gods - Hardcover

Byatt, A. S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802129927 ISBN 13: 9780802129925

Publisher: Grove Pr, 2012

Synopsis

The author of the Booker Prize-winning Possession presents a dramatic retelling of the Norse myth about the end of the world that follows the Blitz-era evacuation of a young girl whose worldview is dramatically changed upon reading Asgard and the Gods and who witnesses the destruction of the natural world half a century later.

About this title

Product Description

Evacuated to the countryside to escape the Blitz, the young AS Byatt derives little comfort from religion, finding solace instead in ancient legends. The award-winning author weaves together themes of war, natural disaster and reckless gods in this retelling of the Norse myth.

Review

Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jeweled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in * * Sunday Telegraph * * Byatt paints beautiful and fantastic word-pictures, glittering verbal special effects -- Allan Massie * * Scotsman * * Colour and sensation flood Byatt's writing . . . One of the most brilliant minds and speakers of our generation. * * Independent * * Byatt's prose, compact and lyrical, treats [the gods] with dignity...Ragnarok is a clever, lucid, lovely book -- M. John Harrison * * Guardian * * Thanks to a rare fusion of imagination and intellect, sensual poetry and cerebral prose, youthful joy and elderly wisdom [,Byatt has made]...an entire world, compressed but energetically alive in all its details. When we have artists like this, who needs gods? -- Peter Conrad * * Observer * * Byatt peels back the cover of the book that the girl reads and takes us deep inside it as she delights in reimagining the twilight of the gods and the destruction of the world. ... Like Wagner before her, [she] dares to dream how the world might end ... this rewriting of the Ragnarok is a story for our time of overpopulation and anthropomorphic climate change, and of all time * * Financial Times * * Surely among the most beautiful and incisive [pages] Byatt has ever written * * Independent * * Byatt's retelling of Ragnarok is permeated with the loving familiarity of long acquaintance. Her language is lapidary. The terrible archness that can infest the narratives of sophisticated writers who attempt to master myth is resoundingly absent. ... It is pleasant to imagine some lonely, bookish child discovering it and becoming entranced -- Jane Shilling * * Evening Standard * * A brilliant, highly intelligent, fiercely personal rendition of the Scandinavian mythology...a gorgeous enrichment and interpretation -- Ursula K. Le Guin * * Literary Review * * Byatt's writing, impassioned and liberated from the strictures of the novel, has never been so beautiful * * Telegraph * * Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jeweled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in. * * Sunday Telegraph * * In her addition to Canongate's series of "Myths", Byatt dramatically retells Nordic legends of the twilight of the gods. * * Independent * * Energy and power drip from Byatt's writing. ... There are too many glittering sentences to quote here in full. * * New Humanist * *

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0802129927
• ISBN 13: 9780802129925
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 177