Winner of England's Booker Prize and a literary sensation Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist sénces to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas.
When A. S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel was made into a mediocre film, some critics argued it simply didn't work as a movie. One might also argue that it doesn't make a good audiobook. POSSESSION has a complicated structure--with poems, letters, and journal entries as well as conventional narrative--that's difficult to follow in audio, but these challenges can be overcome. The downfall of this production is that, as brilliant as POSSESSION is, many parts of the novel are eminently skippable. This is easy and guilt-free with the paperback, but impractical with a tape. And while Virginia Leishman reads dialogue well, her overall delivery is too languid, drawing out Byatt's already excessive prose. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine
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