In The Bloody Chamber, Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, a Beauty is turned into a Beast and Little Red Riding's grandmother is stoned to death as a witch; a young music student is swept off her feet in Paris by a middle-aged aristocrat and transported to his ancestral abode to re-enact the story of Bluebeard against a sumptuous fin de siècle background; a British soldier on a cycling holiday in Transylvania in the summer of 1914 finds himself the guest of an alluring female vampire. By contrast, in Wise Children, Carter's last novel), the comic, the bawdy and the life-enhancing prevail. An irrepressible elderly lady recalls the many colourful decades she and her sister spent as vaudeville performers – a tale as full of twins and mistaken identities as any plot of Shakespeare's. The early collection, Fireworks, reveals Carter taking her first forays into the fantastic writing that was to become her unforgettable legacy. The Everyman's Library omnibus gathers the best of Angela Carter in one astonishing volume.

Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University and from 1976–8 was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She lived in London, briefly in Japan, and travelled and taught widely in the United States. She wrote nine novels, including Shadow Dance, her first, published in 1967, The Magic Toyshop (John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and Nights and the Circus (James Tait Black Memorial Prize). She also published for short-story collections, journalism, non-fiction – The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979) – and the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, based on her story of that name. She died in 1992.