The Powerbook

Winterson enfolds her seventh novel within the world of computers, and transforms the signal development of our time into a wholly human medium. The story is simple: an e-mail writer called Ali will compose anything you like, on order, provided you're prepared to enter the story as yourself and risk leaving it as someone else. You can be the hero of your own life. You can have freedom just for one night. But there is a price, and Ali discovers that she, too, will have to pay it.

The PowerBook reinvents itself as it travels from London to Paris, Capri, and Cyberspace, using fairy tales, contemporary myths, and popular culture to weave a story of failed but requited love.

A novelist whose honours include England's Whitbread Award and the American Academy's E.M. Forster Award, Jeanette Winterson burst into the literary community as a very young woman in the eighties with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and soon won the praise of such masters as Gore Vidal ("the most interesting young writer I have read in twenty years") and Muriel Spark ("just what we need now in the literature of the English language"). She lives in London and the Cotswolds.