In this, her first collection of short stories, Winterson reveals all the facets of her extraordinary imagination. In prose that is full of imagery and word-play, she creates physical and psychological worlds that are at once familiar and yet shockingly strange.

Written on the Body

by Jeanette Winterson

Published 2 February 1993

'This book is a deep, sensual plunge, a worship of the body, inside and out' The Times


In a quiet English suburb, a love affair ignites. For our nameless narrator, Louise is the last in a long line of explosive passions, but the first to have broken their heart. With Louise's husband, Elgin, blocking love's course, their affair is doomed to unravel - until, that is, a terrible choice must be made.
With its witty and masterful prose, Written on the Body takes the reader on a beguiling and defying exploration of love and its physical forms.

'An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body' Sunday Telegraph


The Powerbook

by Jeanette Winterson

Published 7 September 2000
Twenty-first century fiction that uses past, present and future as shifting dimensions of a multiple reality. The story is simple. An e-writer called Ali, or Alix, will write to order anything you like, provided that you are prepared to enter the story as yourself and take the risk of leaving it as someone else.

Art Objects

by Jeanette Winterson

Published 25 May 1995
These interlocking essays uncover art as an active force in the world, neither elitist or remote, present to those who want it, effecting even those who don't. Winterson's own passionate vision of art is presented here, provocatively and personally in pieces on modernism, autobiography, style, more intimately in pieces where she describes her relationship to her own work and the books that she loves.

Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson

Published 4 January 1997
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

Art & Lies

by Jeanette Winterson

Published 23 June 1994
'There is no such thing as autobiography, there is only art and lies'. Set in a London of the near future, its three principal characters, Handel, Picasso and Sappho, separately flee the city and find themselves on the same train, drawn to one another through the curious agency of a book. Stories within stories take us through the unlikely love-affairs of one Doll Sneerpiece, an 18th century bawd, and into the world of painful beauty where language has the power to heal. Art & Lies is a question and a quest: How shall I live?