A S Byatts 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 Godes Tale of the Breton Naie des Trepasses - to be published seperately. Here they take their place with three other stories with medieval and oriental settings. The title story, The Djinn and the Nightingales Eye, a long story about an Englishwoman in Turkey who unwittingly releases a genie from his bottle, is a reflection on womens lives, on magic and on the power of storytelling itself.