'Brave and ambitious' Independent

In a near-future London, Sappho, Picasso and Handel each set upon the same plan - to flee the city by train. Finding themselves fellow passengers, the poet, the painter and the musician discover their fates drawn together by the curious agency of a book.
As stories within stories unfold and journeys intersect, another world comes to the fore - one of painful beauty, where language has the power to heal.


'Winterson's belief in love, beauty, and most of all, language, is evangelical and redemptive...it is timely and exciting to read' Rachel Cusk, The Times

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and two previous collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.