ABOUT
THE BOOK

A Whistling Woman opens in the late 1960s, as the world begins to split, and as Frederica falls almost by accident into a career in television in London. Tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life and the lives of those she loves. Meanwhile, near the university, where the scientists Luk and Jacqueline are studying snails and neurons and the working of the brain, an “anti-university” springs up. On the high moors nearby, a gentle therapeutic community is taken over by a turbulent, charismatic leader. Visions of blood and flames, of mirrors and doubles, share the refracting energy of Frederica’s mosaic-like television shows. The languages of religion, myth and fairy-tale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. Darkness and light are in perpetual tension and the meaning of love itself seems to vanish. People flounder – often comically – seeking their true sexual, intellectual and emotional identities.
With her wayward, lovingly drawn characters and breath-taking twists of plot, A. S. Byatt illuminates the effervescence of the 1960s – both the excitement and the danger – as no one has done before. A Whistling Woman is bursting with ideas, contradictions, scientific discoveries, ethical conflicts, sly humour and wonderful humanity.