America discovered A. S. Byatt when Possession, her Booker Prize-winning Victorian novel, was published here in 1990 and became one of the bestselling books of that year. Readers have been waiting ever since for her next full-length novel. Babel Tower is every bit as brilliant and ambitious as its predecessor, but with a more contemporary setting: the 1960s, a decade of turbulence and passionate ideals that Byatt uses to both frame and propel the lives of her characters.
At the heart of the novel are two law cases that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit, and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both, and her personal and legal crises mirror those of the age. This is the decade of The Beatles, the Death of God, and the birth of computer languages. The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.
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Babel Tower follows The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life in tracing Frederica Potter, a lover of books who reflects the author's life and times. It centers around two lawsuits: in one, Frederica -- a young intellectual who has married outside her social set -- is challenging her wealthy and violent husband for custody of their child; in the other, an unkempt but charismatic rebel is charged with having written an obscene book, a novel-within-a-novel about a small band of revolutionaries who attempt to set up an ideal community. And in the background, rebellion gains a major toehold in the London of the Sixties, and society will never be the same.
"An overwhelming literary experience ... rich and often exhilarating."
-- Washington Post Book World
"Byatt is critical yet empathetic, universal yet specific, emotionally direct yet intellectually playful ... A great, big sweep of a story."
-- Miami Herald
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