Possession
A 1990 Booker Prize winner that runs two love stories in parallel (Victorian poets and modern academics) and uses the detective-novel structure to make you desperate for both. Byatt wrote about the way scholarly obsession can become romantic obsession, and the love letters she invented for her Victorian poets are among the most beautiful in fiction.
The obstacle is built into the book itself: full Victorian letters, diary entries, and mythological digressions run for pages before the mystery resumes, and even devoted readers admit to skipping them. One reviewer calls the invented poets “a series of sock puppets designed entirely to impress,” and another says the whole exercise felt like “too much work for too little reward.” A third found it “too clever, and too complicated, by half” and confesses “I felt quite dumb reading this.” The present-day academic characters take a separate hit: several reviewers say they read flatter than the vividly rendered Victorians, so the modern half feels like the weaker one. Some readers stall around page 100 under the weight of Norse mythology and feminist theory, and a few warn the book's marketing as breezy romance oversells how demanding the text actually is.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
