Witty, stylish and evocative, Ice Cream is Helen Dunmore's astonishing new collection of stories, the first 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, the government ruthlessly regulates conception and childbirth. In several stories a soulful, curious woman named Ulli takes up residence in the reader's imagination--stumbling across a strangely charismatic collector of religious icons, contemplating a youthful pregnancy, and remembering a troubled lover.

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).