Lighthousekeeping

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547541481
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
An orphaned girl is held spellbound by the tales of a lighthouse keeper on the Scottish coast, in a novel by the Costa Award-winning author of The Passion. After her mother is literally swept away by the savage winds off the Atlantic coast of Salts, Scotland, never to be seen again, the orphaned Silver is feeling particularly unmoored. Taken in by the mysterious keeper of a lighthouse on Cape Wrath, Silver finds an anchor in Mr. Pew—blind, as old and legendary as a unicorn, and a yarn spinner of persuasive power. The tale he has to tell Silver is that of a nineteenth-century clergyman named Babel Dark, whose life was divided between a loving light and a mask of deceit. Peopled with such luminaries as Charles Darwin and Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. Pew’s story within a story within a story soon unfolds like a map. It’s one that Silver must follow if she’s to be led through her own darkness, and to find her own meaning in life, in this novel by a winner of the Costa, Lambda, and E.M. Forster Awards, the author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit; Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and other acclaimed works. “In her sea-soaked and hypnotic eighth novel, Winterson turns the tale of an orphaned young girl and a blind old man into a fable about love and the power of storytelling…Atmospheric and elusive, Winterson's high-modernist excursion is an inspired meditation on myth and language.”—The New Yorker

Lighthousekeeping

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307366618
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
Motherless and anchorless, red-headed Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse, located at the isolated northwestern tip of Scotland. Pew teaches her to “man the light” but more importantly he tells her ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of ties that bind and of the slippages that occur throughout every life, not least those of the local inhabitants. One local, Babel Dark, a nineteenth-century clergyman who loved one woman but married another, opens like a map that Silver must follow. Caught in her own particular darknesses, she embarks on an Ulyssean sift through the stories we tell ourselves, stories of love and loss, of passion and regret, stories of unending journeys that move through places and times, and the bleak finality of the shores of betrayal. A story of mutability, of talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, Lighthousekeeping is a way in to the rooms of our own that we secretly inhabit and the lighthouses we strive towards. Jeanette Winterson is one of the most extraordinary and original writers of her generation and this shows her at her lyrical best.

Tanglewreck

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408825384
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
But Time is big business, and whoever gets control of Time controls life as we know it! In a house called Tanglewreck lives a girl called Silver and her guardian Mrs Rokabye. Unbeknown to Silver there is a family treasure in the form of a seventeenth-century watch called the Timekeeper, and this treasure holds the key to the mysterious and frightening changes in time. When Silver goes on the run to try and protect herself and the Timekeeper, a remarkable and compelling adventure unfolds, full of brilliance and wit, as is befitting an author with the imagination and style of Jeanette Winterson.

Light Housekeeping

Author: Susan McCaslin
Publisher: Ekstasis Editions
ISBN: 9781896860145
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 68

Book Description
At times deceptively simple, the poems in Light Housekeeping explore the tentative presence of the soul in everyday life through reflections on teaching, writing, familial bonds and raising a child.

Written on the Body

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307763595
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. “At once a love story and a philosophical meditation.” —New York Times Book Review.

Weight

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307367363
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
The story of Atlas and Heracles Atlas knows how it feels to carry the weight of the world; but why, he asks himself, does it have to be carried at all? In Weight — visionary and inventive, yet completely believable and relevant to the questions we ask ourselves every day — Winterson’s skill in turning the familiar on its head to show us a different truth is put to stunning effect. When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written. Rewritten. The recurring language motif of Weight is “I want to tell the story again.” My work is full of Cover Versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the retelling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text. Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Hercules takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere. —from Jeanette Winterson’s Foreword to Weight

Christmas Days

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9781784709020
Category : Christmas cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
A Sunday TelegraphBook of the Year'Winterson?s winter tales unfailingly succeed in their endeavor to leave you aglow? - Guardian For years Jeanette Winterson has written a new story at Christmas time and here she brings together twelve of her brilliantly imaginative, funny, and bold tales, along with twelve delicious recipes for the twelve days of Christmas.

Gut Symmetries

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307763633
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
The highwire artist of the English novel redraws the romantic triangle for the post-Einsteinian universe, where gender is as elastic as matter, and any accurate Grand Unified Theory (GUT) must encompass desire alongside electromagnetism and gravity. One starry night on a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Alice, a brilliant English theoretical physicist, begins an affair with Jove, her remorselessly seductive American counterpart. But Jove is married. When Alice confronts his wife, Stella, she swiftly falls in love with her, with consequences that are by turns horrifying, comic, and arousing. Vaulting from Liverpool to New York, from alchemy to string theory, and from the spirit to the flesh, Gut Symmetries is a thrillingly original novel by England's most flamboyantly gifted young writer. "Winterson is unmatched among contemporary writers in her ability to conjure up new-world wonder...A beautiful, stirring and brilliant story."--Times Literary Supplement "Dazzling for [its] intelligence and inventiveness...[Winterson] is possessed of a masterly command of the language and a truly pliant imagination."--Elle "One of our most brilliant, visionary storytellers."--San Francisco Chronicle

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802198724
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling author’s Whitbread Prize–winning debut—“Winterson has mastered both comedy and tragedy in this rich little novel” (The Washington Post Book World). When it first appeared, Jeanette Winterson’s extraordinary debut novel received unanimous international praise, including the prestigious Whitbread Prize for best first fiction. Winterson went on to fulfill that promise, producing some of the most dazzling fiction and nonfiction of the past decade, including her celebrated memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?. Now required reading in contemporary literature, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a funny, poignant exploration of a young girl’s adolescence. Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette’s insistence on listening to truths of her own heart and mind—and on reporting them with wit and passion—makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood. “If Flannery O’Connor and Rita Mae Brown had collaborated on the coming-out story of a young British girl in the 1960s, maybe they would have approached the quirky and subtle hilarity of Jeanette Winterson’s autobiographical first novel. . . . Winterson’s voice, with its idiosyncratic wit and sensitivity, is one you’ve never heard before.” —Ms. Magazine

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802194753
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
A New York Times bestseller: The “magnificent” memoir by one of the bravest and most original writers of our time—“A tour de force of literature and love” (Vogue). One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years” Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. Her internationally best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, and has become a staple of required reading in contemporary fiction classes. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a “singular and electric” memoir about a life’s work to find happiness (The New York Times). It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, rose to haunt the author later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about the power of literature, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, or a life raft that supports us when we are sinking. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded story of the search for belonging—for love, identity, home, and a mother.