Dame Marina Warner is a British novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications over the years, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and Vogue.
Warner weaves a world of myths, mermaids and male monsters, but the
best stories here explore less familiar themes.
*The Guardian*
★★★★★ With their unique blend of ancient myth and contemporary
concerns, Warner’s stories are often dark, always gripping, with
unexpected flashes of humour and clashes of the real and the
supernatural. The legendary Mélusine is transformed into an
iPhone-wielding, sassy mermaid in a parable on desire and identity.
When the relationship between a young dancer and her maverick
patron takes a sinister turn, the girl escapes into an alternative
world through the chinoiserie pattern on her curtains. Questions of
gender and feminism, never far from the surface, are explored in a
fresh manner. Warner’s writing is at its strongest when it eschews
abstraction in favour of the physical – descriptions of human
bodies, shimmering underwater creatures, miniature charms with
talismanic powers. These are darkly glittering fairytales for our
times.
*The Lady*
Dame Marina Warner’s non-fiction is deeply concerned with myths,
legends and fairytales. In this collection of magical, haunting
short stories, ordinary situations are infused with strangeness,
and the nursery-rhyme title suggests a common theme of loss and
longing. In Out of the Burning House, an elderly actor in a
care home wonders what he would save from a burning house: “your
house is on fire, you can’t fly away home’’. He’s dwelling on his
sexually confused teenage years, his passion for a TV star named
Lesley Peake, and a first lesson in betrayal. Letter to an
Unknown Soldier is a heartrending scrap of a story; a young
girl is writing to her big brother away at war, when he hasn’t
replied to the last one. And in Ladybird, Ladybird, a young
woman who is trying to get pregnant has a weird encounter with a
dress in a charity shop. Delicate and graceful.
*The Times*
Five stars. In this lovely collection of short stories full of wit
and fantasy, Marina Warner show her ventriloquial gifts as a
writer. Some read like fairy tales, others like literary short
stories.
*Independent on Sunday*
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