The Passion - Softcover

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson won the Whitbread Award for best first fiction for the semi-autobiographical Oranges are not the Only Fruit, an often wry exploration of lesbian possibility bumping up against evangelical fanaticism. She was 25. Two years later, The Passion, her third novel, appeared, the fantastical tale of Henri--Napoleon's cook--and Villanelle, a Venetian gondolier's daughter who has webbed feet (previously an all-male attribute), works as a croupier, picks pockets, cross-dresses and literally loses her heart to a beautiful woman. Written in a lyrical and jolting combination of fairy-tale diction and rhythm and the staccato, the book would be a risky proposition in lesser hands. Winterson has said that she wanted to look at people's need to worship and examine what happens to young men in militaristic societies. The question was, how to do so without being polemical and didactic? Only she could have come up with such an exquisite answer. In the end, Henri, incarcerated on an island of madmen, becomes aware that his passion, "even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else." --Amazon.com

"It's a fantasy, a vivid dream... inventive and brilliant" (Guardian)

"As moving and funny as it is skilful, and reflects the author's formidable appetite for life" (Sunday Times)

"A book of great imaginative audacity and assurance...brilliantly physical (and funny) detail" (Times Literary Supplement)

"Its concentrated, beautifully detailed prose recalls the diction of fairy tales; its plot incorporates their magic, their shrewd wit and brutality...a deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so" (New York Times)

"Lyrical prose penetrates to the heart of things... She knows how to speak plain truth and at the same time satisfy our longing for the fabulous. She's telling you stories. Trust her" (Washington Post)