Ice Cream — Helen Dunmore

With Ice Cream, her first story collection published in the United States, award-winning New York Times notable author of The Siege and A Spell of Winter, Helen Dunmore confirms her status as a master of the shorter form (The Sunday Telegraph). 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. In several stories a soulful, curious woman named Ulli takes up residence in the reader's imagination--stumbling across a strange collector of religious icons, contemplating a youthful pregnancy, and remembering a troubled lover. Employing a poet's ear for the concise and the novelist's ambition of scope, Dunmore captures in Ice Cream how a single moment can change the course of a life-- these stories are] rich with regret, turmoil, and strained optimism (Entertainment Weekly)