Ragnarok
The End of the Gods
A.S. Byatt
“Ungraspable Loki flamed amazement and pleased himself. He was the god of endings. He provided resolutions for stories – if he chose to. The endings he made often led to more problems”
Available as Paperback, eBook, Downloadable audio
An odyssey of childhood, mythology and the imagination from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and The Children’s Book
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, Byatt’s mesmerising tale – inspired by the myth of Ragnarok –is a landmark piece of storytelling from one of the world’s truly great writers.
The Myths series brings together some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson.
“Lyrical and urgent”
the Times
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“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
“Byatt’s writing, impassioned and liberated from the strictures of the novel, has never been so beautiful”
telegraph
A.S. Byatt
A.S. Byatt was renowned internationally for her novels and short stories, including the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the Man Booker-shortlisted The Children’s Book. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, she was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
