A Whistling Woman portrays the antic, thrilling, and dangerous period of the late ?60s as seen through the eyes of a woman whose life is forever changed by her times.

Frederica Potter, a smart, spirited 33-year-old single mother, lucks into a job hosting a groundbreaking television talk show based in London. Meanwhile, in her native Yorkshire where her lover is involved in academic research, the university is planning a prestigious conference on body and mind, and a group of students and agitators is establishing an ?anti-university.? And nearby a therapeutic community is beginning to take the shape of a religious cult under the influence of its charismatic religious leader.

A Whistling Woman is a brilliant and thought-provoking meditation on psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism, and their effects on ordinary lives.

Anyone who has followed the adventures of Frederica and her friends from The Virgin in the Garden through Still Life and Babel Tower will find it impossible to resist A Whistling Woman, the conclusion of A.S. Byatt's masterful quartet on postwar English life and manners. The first book in the series was set in the early 1950s, and A Whistling Woman carries the story through the end of the 1960s. While it lives up to the sweep and gravitas of the earlier volumes, it is slow going at the start, crowded with characters and ideas, not all of which are equally compelling. University politics, feminism, television, psychology, the advent of mass culture, and the emerging science of neurobiology each figure large, although Byatt's emphasis is on the old trio of love, madness, and religion. These novels cover much of the same ground as her sister Margaret Drabble did in The Radiant Way and elsewhere, but have more in common with the work of Iris Murdoch, whose novels showed a similar sympathy for--and fascination with--unreasoned acts of passion. A Whistling Woman is a brilliant evocation of the intellectual and social life of 1960s Britain, with allowance for the occasional grisly murder. --Regina Marler

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