Byatt, a Booker Prize-winning novelist with a love for fantasy as well as philosophy, is also a scholar and a critic, and she slyly explores the interface between the imagined and the factual, the felt and the reasoned, in this merrily satiric tale about a hesitant young man in search of a fuller life. Bored with his postmodern literary-criticism courses, the physically diminutive Phineas Gilbert Nanson seeks a more tangible subject in biography, diligently reading a recommended three-volume life of a little-known polymath written by a forgotten biographer named Scholes Destry-Scholes. So taken is Phineas with this magnum opus, he decides to become the biographer of a biographer. Byatt parlays her hero's awakening into a nimble and provocative pondering of our contradictory desires to belong and to be unique both as individuals and as a species wreaking havoc on the planet. Ardently literary, Byatt nonetheless reminds readers that life itself is what matters and that no work of art can come close to the sheer wonder of nature.