Sometimes our ways of understanding the past, history, and our pressing decisions lead to contradictory interpretations and dangerous results. Byatt’s Gothic Possession (1990) explores the parallel and intertwined lives of poets and researchers a century apart, revealing obsessions, hidden secrets and much about the sources of literature in personal lives. Margaret Atwood’s most recent, lively and disruptive collection of short stories, Stone Mattress (2014), revisits and reimagines different histories, while The Children Act (2015) by Ian McEwan conducts a tale of other interlocking lives, showing that the balance and justice of relationships, life and the law are both relentless and tenuously held.