Living Thing

"Living Thing" is the second novel of the "Frederica Quartet," which is considered, perhaps, the main work of the Dame of the British Empire, Antonia Susan Byatt. The tetralogy was written over a quarter of a century, and its plot also spans a quarter of a century, with the first two novels released before the Booker Prize-winning international bestseller "Possession," and the third and fourth after. Thus, Frederica Potter begins her studies at Cambridge, fiercely eager for knowledge, for independent, adult life, for love — precisely at the moment in history when traditionally isolated Britain receives a massive injection of European culture and begins to change irreversibly. While her elder sister Stephanie sacrifices her studies and academic career for the family, and her younger brother Marcus recovers from a nervous breakdown, Frederica, in contrast to Monet and Mallarmé, who insisted on the "happiness of gradually guessing the subject," prefers to call things by their names. And neither Frederica, nor Stephanie, nor Marcus have any idea of the tragedy that awaits them all in the future…