Babel Tower

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.