The Ice Child

Addressing a consistent set of themes-most revolving around characters who are in conflict with one another based on differences in culture, age, or personality-The Ice Child offers eleven moving short stories by author Leon Arden.

The collection introduces a wide cast of characters and scenarios. A husband and wife, touring Mexico, are confronted while on horseback, by savage bandits; a young man tries to rescue his mother from his father's obsession, which is filling their apartment with more books than it can hold; a comic drama between two lovers is waged solely through messages left on their answering machines; a son wheels his sick father into a hospital and demands, at gun point, that he be given a heart by-pass; a lovely English woman arrives in New York to find she must share an apartment with a man she has never met; and a failed writer, with two friends, programs a computer to create a salable story, but ominously the PC also predicts their immediate future.

Bookended by stories about youth and old age, The Ice Child presents a unique but highly entertaining collection of tales.