Witty, stylish, and evocative, Ice Cream is Helen Dunmore's astonishing new collection of stories, the first by the award-winning author of The Siege and A Spell of Winter 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, conception is ruthlessly controlled by the government. 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). Book jacket.