Elementals

From the booker Prize-winning author ofPossessioncomes 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.

A.S. Byatt is the author of the novels <b>Possession</b> (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), <b>The Game</b>, and the sequence <b>The Virgin in the Garden</b><i>, </i><b>Still Life</b>, and <b>Babel Tower</b>. She has also written two novellas, published together as <b>Angels and Insects</b>, and four collections of shorter works, including <b>The Matisse Stories</b> and <b>The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye</b>. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.