title: Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
author:  A.S. Byatt 
description: A.S. Byatt's stories simmer with a sensuality and passion that, like topiary trees in a formal garden, are pruned and trained into cultivated shapes while retaining the wild scent of the orchard. In "Crocodile Tears" a woman walks away from a personal tragedy, deserting those she loves to try to reconcile herself to a death for which she feels horribly responsible. Thrown together in Nmes with another exiled mourner, a Norwegian full of northern folktales, she ricochets between a numbed calm and a reckless urge for self-destruction. Together they begin to assemble some kind of personal solace out of fragments of European history, fiction, and myth, and so come to terms with their guilt. "A Lamia in the Cevennes" is also set in France, where another isolated English exile struggles for self-knowledge amid the shards of history and folktale. "Cold" is itself a kind of latter-day fairy story of ice princesses and sighing suitors. These are stories steeped in light and color, full of glowing landscapes and sensuous delights. Their intricately woven skeins of literary allusion and keenly observed locations bewitch the reader. Yet the figures in Byatt's landscapes seem powerless to derive pleasure or solace from their surroundings, picking their lonely way through the brilliance, carrying with them burdens of painful memories they cannot shake off. <I>--Lisa Jardine, Amazon.co.uk</I>
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  # Table of Contents
  
  
  [THE COMPLETE EDINBURGH ELEMENTALS SERIES](c001.xhtml)
  
  
  [TEARS OF GOLD](c002.xhtml)
  
  
  [THE LAND OF THE ICE GIANTS](c003.xhtml)
  
  
  [FESTIVAL OF FIENDS](c004.xhtml)
  
  
  [ALSO BY THE AUTHOR](c005.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  # THE COMPLETE EDINBURGH ELEMENTALS SERIES
  
  
  Edinburgh Elementals Box Set
  
  
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  (c) Copyright. Gayle Ramage. 2016\. All Rights Reserved
  
  
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  [http://www.gayleramage.co.uk](http://www.gayleramage.co.uk)
  
  
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  All persons, locales, events and situations depicted in these stories are
  fictitious or used fictitiously by the author. Any resemblance to persons,
  living or dead, is purely coincidental.
  
  
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  THE TROUBLE WITH PIXIES
  
  
  Michael paused at the bottom of the staircase, one hand gripped on the
  mahogany bannister as he looked upwards. Having just lugged the last of the
  boxes up the first set of stairs, bound for his new bedroom, he was now ready
  to relax. But he'd heard something, like the l