Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"[S]cary, beautiful, witty and wistful by turns....It is when the characters truly engage with one another...that Winterson's story transcends the established facts and common fantasies; it becomes art, and thus makes its case most powerfully." Susann Cokal, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[A book] that you don't so much read as drink in, refuse to put down, cast inside of like a hunting dog, seeking against all odds the insight that will illuminate everything, a true answer to the fix we're in." The Los Angeles Times
Review
"Billie is a fascinating character, as is her beloved Spike, the first Robo sapiens. While some readers might not care for the kaleidoscopic structure or eroticism, this beautifully written book is nevertheless recommended." Library Journal
Review
"Characters named Billie Crusoe, Friday and Captain Handsome make it hard to take this novel as seriously as the author does....Vonnegut did it better." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Written in lilting, beautiful, crisply modulated prose...The Stone Gods is a playful but impassioned novel." The Times (UK)
Synopsis
What begins as a witty, satirical futurist adventure deepens into a dazzling exploration of humankind's relationship to environment, power, and technology, and to what defines us as humans.
Synopsis
Playful, passionate, provocative, and frequently very funny, Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods is a story about Earth, about love, and about stories themselves.
On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet—pristine and plentiful, as our own was 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. Off the air, Billie Crusoe and the renegade Robo sapien Spike are falling in love. Along with Captain Handsome and Pink, they're assigned to colonize the new blue planet. But when a technical maneuver intended to make it habitable backfires, Billie and Spike's flight to the future becomes a surprising return to the distant past, and they discover that “everything is imprinted forever with what once was.”
About the Author
Jeanette Winterson is the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1985. Her second novel, The Passion, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize in 1987, and was followed by Sexing the Cherry, which won the 1989 EM Forster Award. Her other works include The Powerbook, Written on the Body, Arts and Lies, Boating for Beginners, The World and Other Places, and a collection of eassays, Art Objects. She lives in Oxfordshire, England.