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The Djinn In The Nightingale's Eye

The Djinn In The Nightingale's Eye

Five Fairy Stories

Summary

**FEATURING THE STORY THAT INSPIRED NEW FILM THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING**

A S Byatt's fairy tales and fables are among the best-loved features of her fiction. Innumerable readers have asked for the two marvellous fairy tales in POSSESSION - 'The Glass Coffin' and 'Gode's Tale' of the Breton Naie des Trepasses - to be published separately.

Here they take their place with three other stories with medieval and middle eastern settings. The title story, 'The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye', a long story about an Englishwoman in Turkey who unwittingly releases a genie from his bottle, is a reflection on women's lives, on magic and on the power of storytelling itself, and has inspired the new film Three Thousand Years of Longing starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.

Reviews

  • Those new to the world of Byatt might well begin here, with these tales-within-tales, which one can read as anything from contemporary allegories - such as the superb Dragon's Breath, evoking every idyll that ever fell foul of war or famine - to sheer celebrations of storytelling itself
    Vogue

About the author

A. S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.
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