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The Children’s Book

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The Children’s Book

By: A. S. Byatt
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
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About this listen

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets.

They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children's book.

Cover illustration © Aitch

©2009 A. S. Byatt (P)2019 Audible, Ltd Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction Heartfelt Thought-Provoking

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I loved this book, brought to life by a very accomplished narrator. It covers a significant arc of time, so very different at the start and end of the novel. Superb.

Exceptional book & narration

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This is a beautiful book about art and loss and power and class and sex. The span of the book is large, covering about 25 years and moving from rural England to the Paris exhibition, Munich and finally the trenches of WW1. The characters are deeply and intricately drawn, and the historical moments responded to by each uniquely.
Juliette Lewis is one of the finest readers, moving fluidly between accents and lending unique inflection to each member of the vast cast of characters, making them recognisable and memorable.
Well worth a listen

A masterful book, sensitively read

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Loved the book. Have read it before but was a treat to listen to Juliet Stephenson

Juliet Stephenson’s wonderful reading

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Although this was a long and complex story with multiple characters I loved it and the way the whole period of time was illuminated

Loved it

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I am not sure that I would have been able to complete a reading of the book, so the audio has been great for allowing the sprawling and ever shifting narrative to just keep on and on as it moves from character to character and place to place. I was pleased to find that Juliet Stevenson was the narrator -- great timing and emphasis. The book is extraordinary in so many ways -- especially for the sheer amount of historical research that is studded through the plot as it traces a group of variously intertwined characters towards the terrible annihilation of the first world war. I have been carrying around the listening -- all 32 hours (!!!!) -- over the last few weeks and become more and more immersed. My family wondered if I was ok as I always had headphones on! A compelling book: art, families, women, children, men -- puppets and politics. The ending leaves so many threads unaccounted for...but I think this reflects a commitment to the complex realism of the book that takes in so much any neat ending would have felt fraudulent. This has been one of the best books that I have experienced in an audio format.

Intelligent and complex book, beautifully read...

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I lived in this book for days, among these very human architecture of characters. Juliet Stevenson’s performance is incredible, and heartfelt.

Exceptional

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Juliet Stevenson and this wonderful writer is a marriage made in heaven! An Audible masterpiece !

Superb

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When I first started listening to this, I did not really know what the story would really be about. It is not the type of book I would normally read and I had not encountered A S Byatt previously. The reason I chose it is because Juliet Stevenson was narrating and I had recently heard her read Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, and she was so good. In the early stages of the book, when all the characters were being introduced, I had a slight feeling of having to stick with it, but I quickly became so involved in the characters' lives that that stage soon passed. The setting of the story, both time and place (I was familiar from childhood with some of the locations) was so interesting and the occupations of the characters slightly unusual and very engaging. By the end of the book, I had become so invested in the characters that I felt the force of events very strongly and I think this shows how well written it is. It also gave me a fresh perspective on some of the events of the early twentieth century. Superbly narrated, of course, and I find this so important with audio books.

So well written—and narrated!

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A wonderful almost-epic about the life and loves of two-and-a-half generations of an extended family and friends, spanning the closing years of the 19th century to the end of the first World War. Plenty of class assumption and cliché from A. S. Byatt, but (for me, at least) this is more than balanced by the subtleties that emerge from her characterisation. She conducts a surprisingly absorbing forensic examination of the conscious and unconscious minds of her characters, comparing inner with outer to knit her characters together into a web that becomes resilient and toughened over decades - for good and bad.

Byatt doesn't spare the Bohemian blushes (I'll try to do this without spoilers): Herbert Methley preys on young women under the guise of a new philosophy of free love, and his victims are rescued by the women connected to him whose class and fellow-feeling does not allow them to name him. Benedict Fludd, a Gill-reminiscent figure of acknowledged genius, pulls his family into a dark undertow that can't be easily escaped until the younger generation emerge to make their own happier connections. Olive Wellwood, the writer at the heart of her own story, preys in a different, ostensibly benign, way on her own children and her sister, with tragic results. I won't say there's comedy - Byatt isn't great at laughs - but there are many lighter moments and a spirit of survival pervades the whole.

It's a typical Byatt story in that it starts with the characters, from which all else builds. It is a masterclass, in fact, of character-driven story over plot. In The Children's Book, the characters are closely drawn and beautifully consistent with themselves over time, while remaining surprising on occasion. Nobody ever does or even says something that you feel is inconsistent with their unique self; a considerable achievement that couldn't be said of many latter-day writers. For all else that she isn't, Byatt IS a writer who treats her characters in good faith - and this brings them fully, delightfully, disturbingly, alive.

Which is why the ending of the book is so painful. I won't say any more, but I wept with each casual sentence setting out the fate of each of "Todefright's bright boys", some of which brought a neat, understated reckoning for the sins of the parents: the later reckoning of the War Office that brothers should not be assigned to the same regiments, for instance.

And the performance. Well, I love Juliet Stevenson's audiobooks anyway, and this is well up to her usual standard: a delight from start to finish, a pitch-perfect rendition delivered with care and considerable style. I particularly welcomed her Northern accent for the Grimwith sisters. It made of the whole something surprisingly robust but delicate, a mirror of the story itself.

Funny, poignant, complex – with excellent reading

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A long and mesmerising story of a group of families, wound around themes of art, love, secrets, betrayal, class, politics and eventually war. Juliet Stevenson's narration is impeccable and fully immerses you in the character's lives. It is fascinating in its descriptions of art and its processes and deeply moving in the epic events of the families lives. One of the best books I've listened to.

Truly Wonderful

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