Winterlong - Softcover

Hand, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553403176 ISBN 13: 9780553403176

Publisher: Bantam Books Ltd, 1991

Synopsis

Elizabeth Hand's darkly sensual debut novel took the science fiction and general reading public by storm and now, seven years later, it is available again in a handsome trade paperback edition. Heralded as a considerable stylistic and imaginative accomplishment, as noteworthy in its way as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, by People magazine, Winterlong explores the disturbing remains of humanity irrevocably altered by genetic engineering run amok.

Amid the ruins of a once great city, a girl and her beautiful long-lost twin brother are drawn to the seductive voice of a green-eyed boy whose name is Death. Together they must journey through a poisoned garden filled with children who kill and beasts that speak--all the while resisting the evil that compels them to join in a nightmare ritual of blood that will unleash the power of the ancients and signal the end of humanity.

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: Bantam Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0553403176
• ISBN 13: 9780553403176
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 424