Academics were sexy long before Sophie and Robert from The Da Vinci Code. Roland is a beleaguered graduate student laboring in the British Library. Our heroine, Maud, is an icy, repressed professor at a provincial English university. By chance they jointly stumble on a cache of hot-blooded love letters by a famous (albeit fictional) Victorian poet named Randolph Ash. Their discovery lights the fuses on both a literary mystery and their own slow-burning romance, which Byatt adroitly braids together with the story of Ash's love affair. An intricate novel, laced with poems and letters, Possession has the narrative structure of a thriller, but Byatt uses that narrative engine for her own, more sophisticated purposes: a moving exploration of the hidden wellsprings of love and art. —L.G.