Best Selling Books by Marina Warner

Depicting a skating party on a frozen river in the Fens, this novel draws together fragments of myth, painting and tribal custom, to create a picture of people tragically at odds in their need for love and in their mastery of the ways to meet it.

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Inspired by "The Tempest", the novelist rewrites the drama of Ariel, Caliban and Sycorax in a Caribbean setting, exploring the colonial conflicts of an imaginary island and one family.

A luminous memoir of post-war childhood, adventure and loss on the banks of the Nile. ''Wonderful - a brave, inventive, touching distillation of memory and imagination'' JENNY UGLOW

Published to accompany the exhibition at Tate Modern 12 May - 17 December 2000.

Light and shadow, reflection, colour and motion - these are the primary elements of visual art. Shadow play, tricks of perspective, anamorphoses and magic lanterns have fascinated artists and craftsmen throughout the centuries and continue to inspire and stimulate the imagination to this day. The Art of Illusion explores this world of perceptual paradox through the astonishing collection of the German experimental filmmaker Werner Nekes, and the work of contemporary artists including Christian Boltanski, Carsten Holler, Tony Oursler and Markus Raetz.The Art of Illusion illustrates a vast range of intriguing optical media and artworks from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries - manuscripts, prints and books, optical devices and experiments, early cameras, games and toys. This handsome volume incorporates optical tricks, puzzles and illusions, which are sure to make it a collector''s item.

An illustrated exploration of Helen Chadwick’s erotic, playful, and fierce 1986 installation. In 1986 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London showed a new commission by the artist Helen Chadwick (1954–1996). What Chadwick conceived for the ICA exhibition explored her characteristic themes—the female body (her own), the aesthetics of pleasure, the material variety and wonder of phenomena—but took them in a new, flamboyant direction. In this illustrated volume, Marina Warner examines one part of Chadwick’s installation, The Oval Court. This work was erotic, playful, and fierce; it showed imaginative ambition on an exceptional scale and a unique, piquant sensibility, both raunchy and delicate. Despite the work’s recognition as a feminist monument of rare intensity, it has rarely been shown or discussed since the author’s catalogue essay for the original exhibition. Warner here reconsiders Chadwick’s influence as an artist who helped to shift conventional aesthetics and transvalue despised, even abominated forms. Exploring the work’s richly layered composition in light of intervening years, Warner shows how Chadwick’s imagination has shaped many artists’ ideas and ethics, and emboldened their adventures with materials.

Using the method and approach of an anthropologist, Marina Warner describes the tribal behaviour of the new savages - British adults in the late Eighties - and the declining role played by children in this new society.

The Lost Father is the narrator''s story of her search for her own and her family''s identity. Davide Pittagora, her grandfather, died from a bullet wound and his "duel" is the pivot on which this independent, modern woman turns an imaginary memoir of her mother''s family. As she is drawn into her own invention, the story becomes distorted and her family are forced to "re-invent". the absent Davide.