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The article focuses on the book "Saints and Strangers," by Angela Carter. In the book, her new collection, Carter gives of her very best. The opening story, about Lizzie Borden, is particularly beautiful in design and density. Carter assembles Lizzie's dreadful crime by picturing the Borden household at the moment before the family wakes on the fateful day in August 1892. In this atmosphere of unbearable immanence, Carter tours the sleeping house like an hallucinee. But whenever this authorial omniscience seems too complete Carter draws back and reminds of how she is straining to imagine these people.

The article discusses about the book "Wise Children," by Angela Carter. Carter has always been a demanding writer, abstract in her own rollicking way, allusive, a profoundly literary novelist of ideas. The present novel is a story of twins Dora and Nora, who are illegitimate in every way. Dora is without shame, but always the question of Nora's illegitimacy haunts her. Dora is obsessed and keeps trying to make sense of their origins. As far as they can gather, Dora and Nora are the unacknowledged daughters of the great Shakespearean actor Meichior Hazard. In a witty turn, Carter redefines family romance to mean a fiction in which a random set of people collude to love one another, to be one another's permanent destiny.