Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice » (1 VINTAGE)

Byatt has done great things for the bookworm's reputation: Her books of and about literary scholarship (particularly the Victorian poetry investigation/love story Possession) take reading out of dusty libraries and into the romance of real, modern life.

From the booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes this richly imaginitive story collection that transports the reader to a world where opposites—passion and loneliness, betrayal and loyalty, fire and ice—clash and converge.

A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince, whose passionate touches scorch her delicate skin. A woman flees the scene of her husband's heart attack, leaving her entire past behind her. Striving to master color and line, a painter discovers the resolution to his artisitc problems when a beautiful and magical water snake appears in his pool. And a wealthy Englishwoman gradually loses her identity while wandering through a shopping mall. Elegantly crafter and suffused with boundless wisdom, these bewitching tales are a testament to a writer at the hieght of her powers.

Fernanda Eberstadt

The disjunction between...art's wide enchantment and a snobbish parochialism, is central to Byatt's writing....Elementals is...full of light and life, the throwaway gleams of a writer at the height of her powers. —The New York Times Book Review