Ragnarok The End of the Gods 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.
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A. S. Byatt Press Reviews
'Lyrical and urgent' The Times
'Brilliant, highly intelligent, fiercely personal ... Gorgeous' -- Ursula K. Le Guin
'Byatt has made ... an entire world, compressed but energetically alive in all its details. When we have artists like this, who needs gods?' Observer
'Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jewelled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in' Sunday Telegraph
'Surely among the most beautiful and incisive pages Byatt has ever written' Independent
'Byatt's writing, impassioned and liberated from the strictures of the novel, has never been so beautiful' Telegraph
'Byatt's prose, compact and lyrical, treats the gods with dignity ... Ragnarok is a clever, lucid, lovely book' Guardian
'Byatt enters with gusto and an almost Ted Hughes-like relish for savagery into this primitive world of sorcery and trickery' Sunday Times
'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
'Byatt's retelling of Ragnarok is permeated with the loving familiarity of long acquaintance' -- Jane Shilling, Evening Standard
About A. S. Byatt
A.S. Byatt is internationally known as a novelist, short-story writer and critic. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, as well as The Shadow of the Sun, The Game and The Biographer's Tale. Her latest novel, The Children's Book, is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009. She is also the author of two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of stories, and has co-edited Memory: An Anthology. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
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