About the Author

Jeanette Winterson OBE was born in Manchester in 1959. She is the author of over twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, including Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Tanglewreck, Art Objects and The Stone Gods. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won her the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, and Winterson adapted the novel for television in 1990. She has also been the recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E.M. Forster Award and two Lambda Literary Awards, which are given to works that explore LGBTQ issues. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

Reviews

Playful but impassioned... Winterson cloaks her disillusionment with our political excesses in a sustained, imaginative jeu d'esprit. Her writing is funny and beautiful
*The Times*

This witty, challenging and thought-provoking novel should be essential reading for anyone concerned with how we live and how we might survive
*Daily Mail*

Playful but impassioned... Winterson cloaks her disillusionment with our political excesses in a sustained, imaginative jeu d'esprit. Her writing is funny and beautiful * The Times *
This witty, challenging and thought-provoking novel should be essential reading for anyone concerned with how we live and how we might survive -- Daily Mail

Prize-winning Brit Winterson applies her fantastical touch to a sci-fi, postapocalyptic setting. Heroine Billie Crusoe appears in three different end-of-the-world scenarios, allowing Winterson to explore the repetitive and destructive nature of human history and an inability (or unwillingness) of people to learn from previous mistakes. In the first section, inhabitants of the pollution-choked planet Orbus have discovered Planet Blue (Earth), and soon set about launching an asteroid at it to kill the dinosaurs that would prevent them from colonizing the planet. The second and third sections are set on Earth in 1774 and then in the "Post-3 War" era. Though passionate condemnations of global warming and war appear frequently, the book also contains a triptych love story: Billie meets Spike, a female "Robo sapien" capable of emotion and evolution, and falls (reluctantly) in love with her. In each of the scenarios, Billie and Spike (or versions of them) fall in love anew while encroaching annihilation looms in the background. Winterson's lapses into polemic can be tedious, but her prose-as stunning, lyrical and evocative as ever-and intelligence easily carry the book. (Apr.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.