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A greatly gifted and original writer...there is an exhilarating freshness and energy to this collection Observer This first book of short stories will delight her fans with their daring. Whether in a world where sleep is illegal or on an island of diamonds where the rich wear coal jewellery, Winterson is the mistress of the short story -- Jessica de Rothschild Tatler The quality of her writing has remained constant: precise, fluent, perfectly judged. This collection is another refinement of that art, studded with metaphors and unexpected asides Independent on Sunday The short story form was made for Jeanette Winterson...mesmerising prose poems The Times Her stories transport us into the dizzyingly fertile mind of one of Britain's most prodigiously gifted authors...breathtaking Scotland on Sunday

Astringently playful stories, written over 12 years, by the Whitbread Award - winning British novelist (Gut Symmetries, 1997, etc.). Though this first collection is brief, its author's talent isn't. Winterson's appetite for social criticism mingles confidently with her lyrical instinct to give us savagely rhythmic portraits of people lost in lives they'd much rather not have to inhabit. This is the story of Tom, begins the tale Newton, following Tom through a tight-lipped rant about the pitfalls of dwelling in a suburb whose diabolically conformist code of etiquette impels its non-hero to conceal my Camus in the fridge. (Of a neighbor who discovers it there: 'Who is Albert K Mew?' She pronounced it like an enraged cat. ) While Winterson attacks righteous insiders, she also batters - persuasively - anomalous Tom and his ilk for the fecklessness of his chosen alienation. In other stories, the balance shifts toward seductive evocation and away from the author's tendency to travesty almost any convention. With Turn of the World, for instance, Winterson revises the fairy-tale genre by invoking the evolution of four islands. Her closing words are fleetly sensuous, if punctuated by wry observation: Naturally enough this island is stocked with lions . . . The lions are ruthless as money. The gold is snap-jawed. Although usually acerbically intelligent, her fiction is also capable of giving itself up entirely to sensory lavishness, as in The Poetics of Sex, a revel whose sections are framed by mischievous subtitles ( Were You Born a Lesbian? ). Winterson's yen for invention can as readily regale us with the details of an Edenic puppyhood ( The 24-Hour Dog ) as skewer Yuletide urges ( O'Brien's First Christmas ). Best of all, she seems willing to risk being misunderstood for the sake of taking choice imaginative lunges. Neither realistic nor surrealistic, but work that oddly alchemizes the virtues of both. (Kirkus Reviews)

It's fair to say that you don't have to be a die-hard Jeanette Winterson fan to read her novels - but it probably helps. Only a fool would underrate her fierce intellectual ability, but it has to be said that her writing can at times be impenetrable and 'difficult'. It seems, however, that the stylistic devices that make Winterson's novels rather too clever for all tastes are perfectly suited to the short story genre - the intensity of her prose is in some way distilled by being compressed into a smaller space. This collection of stories, some written especially for this volume, some dating back as far as 12 years, is rich, dense and beautifully written. The preoccupations are familiar - sex, history, the passage of time - but the protagonists and their histories are fantastic creations: a god; a man who sleeps in a future world where sleeping is outlawed; a silent woman who buys her groceries in four-ounce packets; a passenger on an ocean liner surprised by love. I suspect you will want to return to them again and again. The Life of Thomas More (Kirkus UK)

One of our most brilliant, visionary storytellers. -- San Francisco Chronicle <br> Unforgettable...heartbreaking...hilarious.... A work to be savoured, to be read repeatedly, each reading revealing new depths, new complexities, and new insights. -- National Post <br> Heart-breakingly beautiful...awash in sensuous, colourful imagery. -- The Edmonton Journal <br> An awesome panorama [by] an original and thrilling writer...Compelling and wild. -- The Independent <br> A display of double-edged talent--[Her] first collection of short stories reaffirms her position as one of the great originals of her generation. -- New Brunswick Telegraph - Journal

Author Information

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn't work out. Discovering early the power of books she left home at sixteen to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and two previous collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.

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