'You're not taking me out of here alive': The surreal story behind the mysterious alien landmark near Joshua Tree.Tahoe yacht seized by US Marshals, featured on 'Modern Family,' up for sale.Massive 23andMe survey reveals who may be at the highest risk for long COVID.But what can vanquish "Belgian chocolate and ice cream perfumed with fragile wood-strawberries, crushed by hand into bowlfuls of thick, cool, yellow cream." Nothing, if one is lucky enough to enjoy them, the story seems to suggest. She does not even think of eating ice cream, any more than she thinks of committing murder or lying in the midday sun."īut the birthday girl dares to order the dessert anyway, only to have her trainer scurry to her side to offer tricks of the beauty trade - meditation, regurgitation - to move Clara beyond her craving. Not even this celebrated vanilla, grained like raw silk, pure yet wicked. Dunmore writes, "Clara never eats ice cream. Celebrating her 24th birthday at a trendy restaurant with a group of equally gaunt colleagues, Clara is tantalized by a bowl of ice cream that arrives at the next table. There's the "forty-five-year-old overweight mum," as the narrator describes herself, in "Swimming Into the Millennium," who reluctantly joins a chic London gym to pummel her body into shape, only to discover the gracious pleasures of the gorgeous indoor swimming pool and of two young men who train there.Īnd there's the title story, a delectable trifle about a supermodel named Clara. Where overtly repressed characters are concerned, the sensual world may suddenly beckon like a promised land. Ice cream is but one of the tastier symbols for this choice. But common to each story is a protagonist who must choose to step further into the world or to retreat from it. Nominated for this year's Orange Prize (an award Dunmore won in 1996 for her third novel, "A Spell of Winter"), "Ice Cream" is rich indeed with images and textures that linger in the imagination.Īnd these 18 diverse tales come in myriad fictional flavors, ranging in tone from celebratory to apocalyptic, and in subjects from family tragedy (like the drowning at a turn-of-the-century seaside resort in "Emily's Ring") to young love (the gay teen affair that blossoms unexpectedly in "Lilac"). A luscious, hedonistic quality suffuses "Ice Cream," the second collection of short stories by Helen Dunmore, the prolific British poet and fiction writer.