# The Emperor's Children

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/claire-messud/the-emperors-children/9781447289418

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![The Emperor's Children](https://quivercdn.com/covers/picador/claire-messud/the-emperors-children_978-14-4728-941-8.jpg?v=2026-05-21%2020%3A00%3A51)

- Book: [The Emperor's Children](https://www.bookquiver.com/claire-messud/the-emperors-children) ([The Emperor's Children.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/claire-messud/the-emperors-children.md))
- Authors: [Claire Messud](https://www.bookquiver.com/claire-messud)
- Publisher: picador
- ISBN: 978-14-4728-941-8
- Pages: 592
- Published: 2015-08-13
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

In its scope, style and substance, The Emperor's Children is an attempt to return the novel to its golden age; it is engaged in a conversation with George Eliot, Henry James, Dostoevsky. Its psychological realism is perfect, its characters . . . thrillingly real, alive and utterly convincing in their subtleties of thought and the ticking of their minds. Messud's prose is a timely and intensely pleasurable reminder of the possibilities of the English language. To use the word clarity about her style - dense, chaste, luminously intelligent - is to return the word to its origins; this is style as illumination, shining a searching yet sympathetic light on the minds and inner worlds of her characters, and as a radiant mode of moral inquiry.