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Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each, she writes a private book, bound in its own colour and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh the children play in a storybook world — but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and friends, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets.

Born at the end of the Victorian era and growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation grew up unaware of the darkness ahead; in their innocence, they were betrayed unintentionally by the adults who loved them.

"A.S. Byatt's hugely ambitious new novel....is an eloquent testament to the dangerous power of both art and myth."

Elizabeth Lowry, Times Literary Supplement, 05/15/2009

"Byatt is brilliant on the gathering forces of England and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, their contrasting attitudes towards the part that the land plays in the collective unconscious, their differing forms of nostalgia....[She] reminds us in chilling fashion of the perils of artistic creation, and the duties of its exponents to find out the difference between what is real and what is not."

Alex Clark, Guardian (London), 05/09/2009

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