"The Living Thing" is the second novel of the "Frederica Quartet," considered perhaps the main work of Dame Antonia Susan Byatt, Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The tetralogy was written over a quarter of a century, and its plot also spans a quarter-century, with the first two novels published before the Booker Prize-winning international bestseller "Possession," and the third and fourth after. Thus, Frederica Potter begins studying at Cambridge, fiercely eager for knowledge, for independent adult life, for love—exactly at that point in history when traditionally isolated Britain receives a massive injection of European culture and begins to change irreversibly. While her elder sister Stephanie sacrifices her studies and scientific career for the family, and younger brother Marcus recovers from a nervous breakdown, Frederica, contrasting Mona and Mallarme, who insisted on "the happiness of gradually guessing the subject," prefers to call things by their names. Neither Frederica, nor Stephanie, nor Marcus suspects what tragedy awaits them all in the future…