Book description
Following the death of her mother, an elderly woman begins to undergo
a transfiguration. Her body grows flinty, toughens and crystallises.
An Icelandic stonemason she meets in a graveyard becomes her sole
confidant. As her inexorable metamorphosis continues, the stories he
has to tell of his homeland and its legends begin to resonate.
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally
published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.
A. S. Byatt is internationally known as a novelist, short-story
writer and critic. Her novels include Possession (winner of the
Booker Prize in 1990), and the quartet of The Virgin in the
Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling
Woman, as well as The Shadow of the Sun, The Game
and The Biographer's Tale. Her novel The Children's Book
was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009. She is also the author
of two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and
four collections of stories, and has co-edited Memory: An
Anthology.
Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the
Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English
at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in
1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
