The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories

A stunning collection of fairy tales for grown-ups f rom the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession, a “storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights” ( The New York Times Book Review ). Includes the story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”—the basis for the George Miller film Three Thousand Years of Longing starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton A.S. Byatt portrays the strange relationship between an intelligent heroine—a world-renowned scholar of the art of storytelling—and the marvelous being that lives in a bottle, found in a dusty shop in an Istanbul bazaar. As Byatt renders the relationship between the woman and the being with a powerful combination of erudition and passion, she makes the interaction of the natural and the supernatural seem not only convincing, but inevitable. The companion stories in this collection each display different facets of Byatt’s remarkable gift for enchantment. They range from fables of sexual obsession to allegories of political tragedy, they draw us into narratives that are as mesmerizing as dreams and as bracing as philosophical meditations, and they all inhabit an imaginative universe astonishing in the precision of its detail, its intellectual consistency, and its splendor.