Anne Chisholm
Unoriginally but unavoidably, my most satisfying and pleasurable read for a long time was provided by A.S. Byatt's Possess- ion (Chatto, £13.95). A capacious book of great erudition written with lightness of touch, it manages to be genuinely romantic and exciting while exploring the genre of the romance and the thriller, and to celebrate with an original, modern intelli- gence the perennial delights of love, poetry and landscape. Possession looks sceptically at literary biographies, but an excellent example this year of how such books can revive interest in a writer's work was William Gerhardie by Dido Davies (Ox- ford, £25) where the subject's peculiarities of character and behaviour are chronicled with cool, humorous affection and always related to his eccentric background, psychological and social vulnerability, and exceptional, if fragile, talent. A real dis- covery was the American detective-story writer Sara Paretski, whose latest book is Burn Marks (Chatto, £13.95), Her spare, tough stories set in Chicago contain the essentials; an authentic background of urban squalor and political corruption and a fallible, credible heroine whose love-life is disastrous, housekeeping inadequate, relatives a nightmare and whose best friend is her dog.
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