Possession, A Romance - A.S. Byatt

'Possession' is subtitled ‘A Romance’ and is, among other things, both a quest and a self-consciously literary exploration of love in the contemporary cultural climate where the very word is suspect. English academics Roland and Maud stumble across a literary mystery: hidden correspondence which points to an illicit love affair between two hitherto unconnected Victorian poets, the fictional R.H Ash and Christabel La Motte. Roland and Maud (as well as the reader) work together to piece together the story of the affair through the letters, poem fragments, folkloric myths and other sources which Byatt includes in her narrative. There are ...

This book was recommended to me by a friend. It's not the sort of thing I usually go for. I'm more your Patricia Cornwell type of a girl, but I do have an intellectual streak and she was so impressed with it, I thought it had to be worth giving a go. She was right. It had mystery, it had romance - two romances really, which paralleled each other in a thought-provoking manner, whilst at the same time having you (or at least me) rooting for the protagonists to get together, just like when I'm reading Jilly Cooper (don't be put off if you're not a Jilly Cooper reader, it wasn't Jilly-Cooper-like apart from that). OK, time ...