On the Tor website, Jo Walton talks about one of her favourite books, A. S. Byatt’s Possession.
Possession is an odd book, and I love it and re-read it frequently. It’s about scholars in 1987 trying to find out some precise events that happened in the late nineteenth century and which concern the relationship between two poets. But what it’s really about is the way we are what time has made of us, whether we know it or not, the way we exist in our time and place and circumstances and would be different in any other. The way it does this, the very precise way in which the theme is worked out in all the curlicues of the story, makes the experience of reading it more like reading SF than like a mainstream work.
Jo Walton was a science fiction reader and fan long before she became a published writer. What she’s doing for Tor now, back in the mid-nineties she did on rec.arts.sf.written and I can’t tell you how many books and writers I only discovered through them. Including Possession.