Margaret Drabble, Sister A.S. Byatt Have New Books

"The Pattern in the Carpet/A Personal History With Jigsaws" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 350 pages, $25), by Margaret Drabble. "The Children's Book" (Alfred A. Knopf, 675 pages, $26.95), by A.S. Byatt: Over 1,000 pages of deft storytelling and odd, fascinating pieces of history are contained in new books by Margaret Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Drabble's pen name). They offer a range of subjects, including ceramic art, original fairy tales, women's liberation under Queen Victoria and the development of the jigsaw puzzle.

Queen Elizabeth II has named both sisters "dame commander" of the Order of the British Empire, a title that equals "sir" for males. Both were stars at Cambridge back when the university refused to grant degrees to women. Both have distinguished reputations as literary scholars. Each has written over a dozen novels and a book on Victorian poet William Wordsworth.

The sisters don't get along too well.

"Any small thing may cause offense," Drabble writes. "... My sister Susan said in an interview somewhere that she was distressed when she found that I had written (many decades ago) about a particular tea set that our family possessed, because she had always wanted to use it herself. She felt I had appropriated something that was not mine. ... Writers are territorial and they resent intruders."

Drabble, 70, best known for her novels, says she's giving up fiction to avoid repeating herself. She undertook a history of jigsaw puzzles to counter depression. Gradually "The Pattern in the Carpet" became a highly readable personal memoir, recalling a favorite aunt who was a jigsaw puzzle devotee, explaining how the puzzles were used in educating King George III's 15 children and reflecting on the nature of play.

She describes how putting a puzzle together can give players a warm _ if unjustified _ feeling of participation in creating the picture.

Byatt, 72, presents "The Children's Book," her first novel since "Possession" won the Booker Prize in 1990 and was made into a well-praised film.

"The Children's Book" deals with matters weightier than tea sets, though two major characters devote their lives to ceramic art.

Ceramics play an important role in professional, familial and extramarital relations among a half-dozen families, mostly British.

A dominating character is the seductive Olive Wellwood, a successful writer of fairy tales with characters like the queen of Elfland, salamanders, loblollies and a boy who has no shadow. Wellwood also continually updates her private manuscripts, which are kept in a special cupboard. They're unconcluded fairy tales, one for each of her seven children.

As background, Byatt paints a history of Britain during the reign of Victoria's son Edward VII _ the high-living king sometimes called "Edward the Caresser" _ and during the first decades of the 1900s. There are grisly descriptions of World War I slaughter in Belgium and France; less grisly ones describe clashes between British police and demonstrators for women's suffrage.

The author likes bringing historic figures into her tale. Sometimes that results in what look like fictionalized episodes involving Rupert Brooke, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, German Emperor Wilhelm II and J. M. Barrie, author of "Peter Pan." All good for cameo appearances if there's a movie to come.