**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.
