Like her award-winning novels, Marina Warner's stories conjure up mysteries and wonders in a physical world, treading a delicate, magical line between the natural and the supernatural, between openness and fear.

In 'Natural Limits', a bereaved woman, contemplating the massacre of 11,000 virgins, comes to terms with the unimaginable. The title story and 'Canary' search for signs of evil or innocence written on the body. The 'Insomniac Princess' finds that unheard melodies are indeed sweeter; whereas other stories give voice to the traditionally voiceless - the artist's model and the film double.

Here are fabulous images of saints and sinners, bats and nightingales, pink flesh and putrefaction in an electrifying new collection.

Marina Warner spent her early years in Cairo, and was educated at a convent in Berkshire, and then in Brussels and London, before studying modern languages at Oxford. She is an internationally acclaimed cultural historian, critic, novelist and short story writer. From her early books on the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc, to her bestselling studies of fairy tales and folk stories,From the Beast to the BlondeandNo Go the Bogeyman, her work has explored different figures in myth and fairy tale and the art and literature they have inspired. She lectures widely in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, and is currently Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. She was appointed CBE in 2008.www.marinawarner.com

'The stories are all sharp and strange...[this is] a book about now written with a far-sighted and relentless intelligence' - Ali Smith, Guardian