Enlarge By Eamonn McCabe A.S. Byatt deftly blends the fantastical with the real.  ABOUT THE BOOK The Children's Book By A.S. Byatt Knopf, 675 pp., $26.95  Interactive Calendar

The Booker Prize-winning author of the 1990 best seller Possession begins her story in the late 19th century, the last gasp of the Victorian era, and follows for 25 years the lives of two generations of a collection of families tied together by friendship or marriage.

At the center of this epic are the Wellwoods and their many offspring. Olive, the matriarch, is the author of children's books, vivid tales of fairies and demons, little people and spirits. The English countryside is also home to the Fludds, the strangely listless relations of a visionary and volatile potter, Benedict.

Along with other families, they weave in and out of one another's lives, building an edifice of domestic tranquility that increasingly becomes a house of cards.

This is not a quick read at almost 700 pages. Byatt rewards such effort, however, by serving a literary feast, telling the story not only of these characters but of their world, one brimming with talk of anarchy and women's suffrage. The socialist Fabian Society figures prominently.

Byatt sprinkles in cameos by major figures of this era, including the bedeviled Oscar Wilde and the sculptor Rodin. She sets elaborate stages for her characters in historical events, from the 1900 World's Fair in Paris to the killing fields of World War I.

And she creates an alternate universe, the frightening fantasy world from which Olive Wellwood draws as she writes of children who are lured away from their parents to live with magical beings or who must descend into the depths of hidden worlds to save themselves from demons.

In the fictional world of these stories and the real world of the Wellwoods, Fludds and other families, children are surrounded by secrets. These deceptions shape the young lives that grow to adulthood in a world on fire.

Byatt fills a huge canvas with the political and social changes that swept the world in those years, and the devastation of war that swept its families. She elicits great compassion for the individual beings caught in that tableau. It's not a tale you'll soon forget.