Category: Fiction

The myth of Atlas, re-told. Weight & destiny & choice: how things seem inevitable, but what if they’re not?

A book full of wind and sea and salt. Silver, an orphan, is apprenticed to a lighthousekeeper to learn the trade, but of course, this being Jeanette Winterson, that’s only one of this book’s many stories. (There are always many stories, stories to hear and stories to tell.) There’s the story of Babel Dark, or…

Ways of displacing the self, ways of finding the self: writing words for other people (this novel’s protagonist is an “anonymous author”), walking through an unknown city, learning to speak a new launguage, falling in love.

As impossible to put down as Tipping the Velvet was, a story of petty thieves, scheming to get rich, plot twists and the question of who knows what, and when. And London, always London: the narrow streets of Southwark, the dome of St Paul’s and the polluted Thames.

Engrossing from the first sentence, a story to get lost in. London theatres, London streets, love and cruelty. Music halls and girls in suits, rent boys turning tricks in parks and alleyways, all of it a delight to read.

Soho (London) in the 1950s, rhyming slang (“she’s probably too Brahms to give a monkey’s”) and all the pimps and their girls, the mobsters, and seven-year-old Rosie at the center of it all. Fun and charming, though sometimes precious or sentimental: sentences like “Now I like the telly as much as the next person, but…

Every chapter of this book (the chapters rotate through the seasons, starting with spring and ending in winter) made me smile: each one was just as lovely as the last. Italy in the early ’50s, Italy in the mid ’60s: factory work, a polluted river, kids who ask their father, “Are cows like trams?” Marcovaldo…

Beautiful and obscure, flights of fancy, flights of language. A photographer and a writer: light, images, reflections, mirror-images. Constructions: creating the self, creating images, creating reflections. A clothing-optional tearoom, water everywhere, birds and plants and city streets, visions and dreams: no idea what’s past or present, what’s real or not (but in books, do such…

Hercule Poirot is clever and amusing, and it’s such fun to watch the drama of this book unfold: to get little clues here and there, but not to realize the full picture until Poirot explains it all at the end.

Weetzie Bat is all grown up (Cherokee and Witch Baby are in college!) and life with her secret-agent lover-man isn’t as perfect as it should be. So she packs a suitcase and heads off to the pink hotel, where, of course, she meets all sorts of interesting people, and all sorts of strange things happen.…