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.

‘The Children’s Book’  has had mixed reviews, although nearly all stand in awe of the ’stretch’ of the book, and its erudition and sheer vitality. It is according to The Guardian ‘a staggeringly detailed and charged re-creation of the period between the end of the 19th century and the first world war’  According to The Telegraph’s reviewer, ‘the novel brings together many of the interests that have been played out in Byatt’s work over the years: the historical novel, fairy tales, the visual arts, the question of what it is to be a writer. But perhaps what sets it apart from some of her other work is that it feels personal and heartfelt, and many of the novel’s strands seem to evoke Byatt’s own life.’

To sum, it is an ambitious work of more than 600 pages which one can confidently call a literary novel. To be taken seriously….