Winterlong: A Novel - Softcover

Hand, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061057304 ISBN 13: 9780061057304

Publisher: Harper Prism, 1997

Synopsis

In the ruins of a once great city, separated twin children are reunited and undertake a dangerous journey to participate in a blood ritual that will signal the end of human history. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth Hand is the award-winning author of six novels, including Black Light and Waking the Moon, and one short story collection, Last Summer at Mars Hill.

From Publishers Weekly:

This first novel is a richly imagined work set in a Washington, D.C., devastated by nuclear and biological warfare. Society is rigidly stratified: the Ascendants, absentee rulers who were responsible for the devastation; the Curators, who tend the city's nearly destroyed museums and libraries; the Paphians, who barter sexual favors for goods; and the Lazars, wretched survivors of periodic germ warfare who subsist by cannibalism. The plot revolves around the reunification of twins separated in childhood: one, a male, is now a Paphian; the female is a "neurologically augmented empath specializing in emotive engram therapy." Hand's world is nuanced and believable and her characters, especially the female twin, come convincingly alive. Her attempts to imbue the plot with mythic sensibility, however, do not succeed, resulting in a good science fiction framework burdened with badly grafted elements of fantasy and the occult. The final scene, in which the incestuous reunion between the twins heralds the onset of a cataclysmic "Final Ascension," is disappointing in its murkiness.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Prism
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0061057304
• ISBN 13: 9780061057304
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 349