Awards

• Short-listed for Man Booker Prize (Novel) 2019

Overview

Since her astonishing debut at twenty-five with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has achieved worldwide critical and commercial success as one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time (Elle). Her new novel, Frankissstein, is an audacious love story that weaves together disparate lives into an exploration of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and queer love. Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mom again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead... but waiting to return to life. What will happen when homo sapiens is no longer the smartest being on the planet? In fiercely intelligent prose, Jeanette Winterson shows us how much closer we are to that future than we realize. Funny and furious, bold and clear-sighted, Frankissstein is a love story about life itself.

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Reviews

Praise for Christmas Days Nowhere is [Winterson's] faith in the transporting power of storytelling more on display... dark, otherworldly and (trademark Winterson) wickedly funny. --New York Times Book Review Brilliant... [a] delightful little book. --Washington Post A feast of stories...Winterson has wrapped up a holiday present between two covers. --NPR Praise for Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Arresting and suspenseful... Offers literary surprises and flashes of magnificent generosity and humor. --Washington Post Book World Winterson writes with heartrending precision... Ferociously funny and unfathomably generous, Winterson's exorcism-in-writing is an unforgettable quest for belonging... A magnificent tour-de-force. --Vogue One of the most entertaining and moving memoirs in recent memory... A marvelous gift of consolation and wisdom. --Boston Globe [Winterson is] searingly honest yet effortlessly lithe as she slides between forms, exuberant and unerring, demanding emotional and intellectual expansion of herself and of us. --Elle

Praise for Frankissstein [A] dazzlingly intelligent meditation on the responsibilities of creation, the possibilities of artificial intelligence and the implications of both transsexuality and transhumanism... Winterson's great gift as a writer... is the ability to inject pure thought with such freewheeling enthusiasm and energy that ideas take on their own kind of joyous life. Frankissstein abounds with invention... Deeply evocative historical realism balanced by hilarious, almost bawdy set pieces... A work of both pleasure and profundity, robustly and skillfully structured. --Guardian Gleefully Gothic... Dazzling... Enjoyably audacious. --Independent Sparky, funny and finely calibrated to ask weighty questions with the lightest of touches, Frankissstein is romantic, unsettling and beautifully written. --Sunday Express A riotous reimagining with an energy and passion all of its own that reanimates Frankenstein as a cautionary tale for a contemporary moment dominated by debates about Brexit, gender, artificial intelligence and medical experimentation... While the story has a gripping momentum of its own, it also fizzes with ideas. --Financial Times A surge of inventiveness... Frankissstein is a book that seeks to shift our perspective on humanity and the purpose of being human in the most darkly entertaining way... gloriously well observed. --Observer A hold-on-to-your hat modern-day horror story about very modern-day neuroses and issues. --BBC News Intelligent and inventive... Frankissstein is very funny. There has always been a fine line between horror and high camp, and this is a boundary that Winterson gleefully exploits. --The Times Highly inventive... Lyrical, gloriously raunchy, pulpy and absurd. --New Scientist Winterson has long been interested in the politics of identity and is good here on the way our aspirations and anxieties about AI tap into ancient and eternal human dreams of perfectibility... One half of the book is saturated in the restless melancholy of the Victorian Gothic, the other in the ruthless sterility of Silicon Valley. --Daily Telegraph This fast-paced novel of ideas is animated with ease and vigor... We're reminded that human relationships and all the emotions they entail are precisely the things that can't be replicated. This is, after all, a love story. --i Hilarious but serious time-travel gambol with Frankenstein: modern doubles into AI, cryogenics, and sexbots. (Hint: Mod. Byron does not come out of it well.) --Margaret Atwood Praise for Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Arresting and suspenseful... Offers literary surprises and flashes of magnificent generosity and humor. --Washington Post Book World Winterson writes with heartrending precision... Ferociously funny and unfathomably generous, Winterson's exorcism-in-writing is an unforgettable quest for belonging... A magnificent tour-de-force. --Vogue One of the most entertaining and moving memoirs in recent memory... A marvelous gift of consolation and wisdom. --Boston Globe [Winterson is] searingly honest yet effortlessly lithe as she slides between forms, exuberant and unerring, demanding emotional and intellectual expansion of herself and of us. --Elle

Praise for Frankissstein Winterson has stitched together that rarest of beasts: a novel that is both deeply thought-provoking and provocative yet also unabashedly entertaining (I laughed out loud more times than I could count). Frankissstein, like its protagonist Ry, is a hybrid: a novel that defies conventional expectations and exists, brilliantly and defiantly, on its own terms. -Sarah Lotz, New York Times Book Review This novel is talky, smart, anarchic and quite sexy. You begin to linger on those three s's when you speak the title aloud. -Dwight Garner, New York Times [A] dazzlingly intelligent meditation on the responsibilities of creation, the possibilities of artificial intelligence and the implications of both transsexuality and transhumanism... Winterson's great gift as a writer... is the ability to inject pure thought with such freewheeling enthusiasm and energy that ideas take on their own kind of joyous life. Frankissstein abounds with invention... Deeply evocative historical realism balanced by hilarious, almost bawdy set pieces... A work of both pleasure and profundity, robustly and skillfully structured. --Guardian Gleefully Gothic... Dazzling... Enjoyably audacious. --Independent Sparky, funny and finely calibrated to ask weighty questions with the lightest of touches, Frankissstein is romantic, unsettling and beautifully written. --Sunday Express A riotous reimagining with an energy and passion all of its own that reanimates Frankenstein as a cautionary tale for a contemporary moment dominated by debates about Brexit, gender, artificial intelligence and medical experimentation... While the story has a gripping momentum of its own, it also fizzes with ideas. --Financial Times A surge of inventiveness... Frankissstein is a book that seeks to shift our perspective on humanity and the purpose of being human in the most darkly entertaining way... gloriously well observed. --Observer A hold-on-to-your hat modern-day horror story about very modern-day neuroses and issues. --BBC News Intelligent and inventive... Frankissstein is very funny. There has always been a fine line between horror and high camp, and this is a boundary that Winterson gleefully exploits. --The Times Highly inventive... Lyrical, gloriously raunchy, pulpy and absurd. --New Scientist Winterson has long been interested in the politics of identity and is good here on the way our aspirations and anxieties about AI tap into ancient and eternal human dreams of perfectibility... One half of the book is saturated in the restless melancholy of the Victorian Gothic, the other in the ruthless sterility of Silicon Valley. --Daily Telegraph This fast-paced novel of ideas is animated with ease and vigor... We're reminded that human relationships and all the emotions they entail are precisely the things that can't be replicated. This is, after all, a love story. --i Hilarious but serious time-travel gambol with Frankenstein: modern doubles into AI, cryogenics, and sexbots. (Hint: Mod. Byron does not come out of it well.) --Margaret Atwood Praise for Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Arresting and suspenseful... Offers literary surprises and flashes of magnificent generosity and humor. --Washington Post Book World Winterson writes with heartrending precision... Ferociously funny and unfathomably generous, Winterson's exorcism-in-writing is an unforgettable quest for belonging... A magnificent tour-de-force. --Vogue One of the most entertaining and moving memoirs in recent memory... A marvelous gift of consolation and wisdom. --Boston Globe [Winterson is] searingly honest yet effortlessly lithe as she slides between forms, exuberant and unerring, demanding emotional and intellectual expansion of herself and of us. --Elle

Praise for Frankissstein Winterson has stitched together that rarest of beasts: a novel that is both deeply thought-provoking and provocative yet also unabashedly entertaining (I laughed out loud more times than I could count). Frankissstein, like its protagonist Ry, is a hybrid: a novel that defies conventional expectations and exists, brilliantly and defiantly, on its own terms. -Sarah Lotz, New York Times Book Review This novel is talky, smart, anarchic and quite sexy. You begin to linger on those three s's when you speak the title aloud. -Dwight Garner, New York Times A brainy, batty story -- an unholy amalgamation of scholarship and comedy. [Winterson] manages to pay homage to Shelley's insight and passion while demonstrating her own extraordinary creativity... his is no work of conventional literary history. It's just a jump to the left... The dialogue is slick and funny, often delightfully obscene, but beneath all the kookiness, Winterson is satirizing sexual politics and exploring complicated issues of human desire... a bag of provocative tricks and treats. With diabolical ingenuity, [Winterson's] found a way to inject fresh questions about humanity's future into the old veins of Frankenstein. -Ron Charles, The Washington Post Frankissstein is intellectually bracing and sexually explicit; a historical literary romp and a futuristic thriller. It, like its characters, rejects the binary. -Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times [A] dazzlingly intelligent meditation on the responsibilities of creation, the possibilities of artificial intelligence and the implications of both transsexuality and transhumanism... Winterson's great gift as a writer... is the ability to inject pure thought with such freewheeling enthusiasm and energy that ideas take on their own kind of joyous life. Frankissstein abounds with invention... Deeply evocative historical realism balanced by hilarious, almost bawdy set pieces... A work of both pleasure and profundity, robustly and skillfully structured. --Guardian Gleefully Gothic... Dazzling... Enjoyably audacious. --Independent Sparky, funny and finely calibrated to ask weighty questions with the lightest of touches, Frankissstein is romantic, unsettling and beautifully written. --Sunday Express A riotous reimagining with an energy and passion all of its own that reanimates Frankenstein as a cautionary tale for a contemporary moment dominated by debates about Brexit, gender, artificial intelligence and medical experimentation... While the story has a gripping momentum of its own, it also fizzes with ideas. --Financial Times A surge of inventiveness... Frankissstein is a book that seeks to shift our perspective on humanity and the purpose of being human in the most darkly entertaining way... gloriously well observed. --Observer A hold-on-to-your hat modern-day horror story about very modern-day neuroses and issues. --BBC News Intelligent and inventive... Frankissstein is very funny. There has always been a fine line between horror and high camp, and this is a boundary that Winterson gleefully exploits. --The Times Highly inventive... Lyrical, gloriously raunchy, pulpy and absurd. --New Scientist Winterson has long been interested in the politics of identity and is good here on the way our aspirations and anxieties about AI tap into ancient and eternal human dreams of perfectibility... One half of the book is saturated in the restless melancholy of the Victorian Gothic, the other in the ruthless sterility of Silicon Valley. --Daily Telegraph This fast-paced novel of ideas is animated with ease and vigor... We're reminded that human relationships and all the emotions they entail are precisely the things that can't be replicated. This is, after all, a love story. --i Hilarious but serious time-travel gambol with Frankenstein: modern doubles into AI, cryogenics, and sexbots. (Hint: Mod. Byron does not come out of it well.) --Margaret Atwood Winterson might be the most expansive, the most ambitious, the most wide-ranging of all out lesbian writers. --Benjamin Moser Praise for Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Arresting and suspenseful... Offers literary surprises and flashes of magnificent generosity and humor. --Washington Post Book World Winterson writes with heartrending precision... Ferociously funny and unfathomably generous, Winterson's exorcism-in-writing is an unforgettable quest for belonging... A magnificent tour-de-force. --Vogue One of the most entertaining and moving memoirs in recent memory... A marvelous gift of consolation and wisdom. --Boston Globe [Winterson is] searingly honest yet effortlessly lithe as she slides between forms, exuberant and unerring, demanding emotional and intellectual expansion of herself and of us. --Elle

Author Information

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester, England. After graduating from Oxford University she published her first novel at 25, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, to widespread acclaim and a BAFTA for her BBC TV adaption. Twenty-seven years later she revisited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.

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