The Stone Gods - Hardcover

Winterson, Jeanette

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151014914 ISBN 13: 9780151014910

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008

Synopsis

This new world weighs a yatto-gram.

But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me-tiny or blurred-out-offocus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there are long-toed claw prints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish . . .

Mankind has rendered its planet unlivable and is beginning to colonize a new blue planet. Our heroine Billie Crusoe’s flight to the future is also a return to the distant past—“Everything is imprinted forever with what once was.” What begins as a witty, satirical futurist adventure deepens into a dazzling exploration of our relationship to environment, to power and technology, and to what defines us as humans.

For over twenty years Jeanette Winterson has consistently been one of our most brilliant writers. Lyrical, visionary, by turns funny and devastating, The Stone Gods is fiction at its most provocative.

About this title

About the Authors

JEANETTE WINTERSON is the author of eight novels, a short-story collection, a book of essays, and, most recently a children's picture book. She has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award. She lives in Oxfordshire and London.

JEANETTE WINTERSON is the author of eight novels, a short-story collection, a book of essays, and, most recently a children's picture book. She has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award. She lives in Oxfordshire and London.

Reviews

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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0151014914
• ISBN 13: 9780151014910
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 206