Matisse Stories, The

Description: This brilliant collection has been called "a masterpiece" by the Sunday Telegraph. Each of the three stories is touched in a different way by the paintings of Henri Matisse. Their subjects' lives unravel from simple beginnings -- a trip to the hair dresser, a cleaning woman's passion for knitting, lunch in a Chinese restaurant but gradually the veneer of ordinariness is peeled back to expose pain, reveal desire, or express the intensity of joy in color and creation.

Review: "Full of delight and humor...The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion" San Francisco Chronicle "A. S. Byatt's three-tale sequence hits the imagination's retina with all the vibrant splatter of an exploding paintbox... Everywhere, scenes sizzle with chromatic intensity" Sunday Times "A writer of dazzling inventiveness" Time "Brilliant... Byatt's fiction, like Matisse's art, pays close attention to colours and contours of surfaces, then probes beneath them to reveal further suprises" Newsday "Exquisite triptych... The Matisse Stories is richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people" People

Author Biography: A.S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story-writer and critic. Her books include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman and The Children's Book. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

The myriad ways in which art plays into the drama of human relationships are explored here with all the visual, verbal and theatrical flair typical of A. S. Byatt's writing.