<DIV>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 world-class storyteller. 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. 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.</div>