A Novelist Whose Fiction Comes From Real Lives
A. S. BYATT is an enthusiastic reader of Victorian novels, and in some ways she is a writer of them as well, or of updated versions. Her new novel, “The Children’s Book,” which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize awarded on Tuesday, is 675 pages long and has a Trollopean heft and sweep; it starts in 1895 and ends after World War