Ragnarok: the End of the Gods (Canons) - Softcover

A.S. Byatt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782117180 ISBN 13: 9781782117186

Publisher: Canongate Canons, 2016

Synopsis

As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. Struggling to make sense of her new wartime life, she is given a copy of a book of ancient Norse myths and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this mesmerising tale - inspired by the myth of Ragnarok - is a landmark piece of storytelling from one of the world's truly great writers.

About this title

Review:

"Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jewelled 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" (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) --Scotsman

"Energy and power drip from Byatt's writing. ... There are too many glittering sentences to quote here in full." (New Humanist) --New Humanist

"Crafted prose captures the mellifluous cadences of the heroic saga" (James Urquhart Financial Times Life and Arts) --Financial Times

Book Description:

An odyssey of childhood, mythology and the imagination from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and The Children's Book

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Canons
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1782117180
• ISBN 13: 9781782117186
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192