About the Author

A novelist whose honours include England’s Whitbread Prize, and the American Academy’ s E. M. Forster Award, as well as the Prix d’argent at the Cannes Film Festival, Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene as a very young woman in 1985 with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Her subsequent novels, including Sexing the Cherry, The Passion, Written on the Body, and The PowerBook, have also gone on to receive great international acclaim. Her latest novel is Lighthousekeeping, heralded as "a brilliant, glittering, piece of work" (The Independent). She lives in London and the Cotswolds.

Reviews

Handel is a failed priest but abiding Catholic with elitist tendencies whose work as a doctor forces him to consider social questions that he would probably rather avoid. Picasso, as she calls herself, is a young artist who has been sexually abused by her brother but whose family thinks she is at fault for her dark moods. Sappho is, indeed, Sappho, the lesbian poet of ancient Greece, who here proclaims herself a sensualist and then proceeds to dissect "the union of language and lust." The three converge in a place that may be England in a not-too-distant future made ugly by pollution and even uglier by greed. This is not a novel but an extended rift on art, sex, religion, social repression, the dangers of patriarchy, and everything that is wrong with the contemporary drift to the right. As such, it will be hard going for most readers, but those with some patience will discover exceptionally evocative writing and a vivifying review of some much-discussed contemporary issues. Here, Winterson is even more unmoored than in her spectacular if discursive Written on the Body (LJ 2/15/93); what will she do next? For literary collections.‘Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

In her highly experimental fifth novel (after Written on the Body), Winterson abandons a linear plot in favor of a kaleidoscopic, polysemous study of ruptured lives and artistic pursuits. The story is full of philosophical musings on the intertextuality of art, the marginalization of female creativity and the ravages of modernity. It concerns three characters who converge on a train departing a dystopian, futuristic London: Handel, a brooding, defrocked priest and doctor; Picasso, an introspective painter who attempted suicide after being raped by her brother; and Sappho, a restless, ethereal incarnation of the Greek lyric poet. Each character is fleeing past traumas and present injustices; each undergoes a vague apotheosis by the novel's end. The story also involves the discovery of an ancient book whose passages, by writers throughout history, are interpolated into the text. Despite its poetic cadences and epigrammatic phrasings, Winterson's language often succumbs to bizarre imagery and bewildering narrative leaps (the final nine pages are from the score of Strauss's Rosenkavalier). This emphatically esoteric novel will reward those readers patient enough to thread together its patchwork of themes and ideas. (Mar.)