Description

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Award-winning and New York Times Notable author of The Siege and A Spell for Winter, Helen Dunmore encapsulates, in her brilliant story collection Ice Cream, "how a single moment can change the course of a life . . . the stories are] rich with regret, turmoil, and strained optimism" (Entertainment Weekly).

Witty, stylish and evocative, Ice Cream is Helen Dunmore's astonishing new collection of stories, the first to be published in the United States. World-class storyteller Helen Dunmore explores friendship, regret and mysterious passions in stories crafted with subtlety, humor and a surprising tenderness. In each taut, agile tale, characters negotiate situations that are often both mundane and bizarre: a cafeteria cook confronts her Polish pen pal; a divorced mother gains insight from a parking meter; a beautiful, thin and famous woman succumbs to the lure of comfort food; a grieving husband says farewell to his wife; a boastful writer is put in his place in spectacular fashion; and in a chilling future, the government ruthlessly regulates conception and childbirth. In several stories a soulful, curious woman named Ulli takes up residence in the reader's imagination--stumbling across a strangely charismatic collector of religious icons, contemplating a youthful pregnancy, and remembering a troubled lover.

In Ice Cream, Dunmore reveals both her poet's ear for the concise and piercing potentialities of language and the novelist's ambition of scope, proving her status as "a master of the shorter form" (The Sunday Telegraph).

About the Author

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Helen Dunmore has published seven novels, including The Siege, A Spell of Winter, and With Your Crooked Heart (Atlantic Monthly Press), and has been published in 15 countries. She is also a children's novelist, short-story writer, prize-winning poet, and first-ever winner of England's prestigious Orange Prize. She reviews fiction regularly for The Times (London) and poetry for The Observer and Poetry Review. She has also written for The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Mail. Dunmore has acted as a judge for the National Poetry Competition, the Somerset Maugham Awards, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, The Forward Prize, and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. She is a Fellow of England's Royal Society of Literary and a member of the Society of Authors, Humanities and Social Sciences. She lives in Bristol, England with her family.