The Stone Gods

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 Crusoes flight to the future is also a return to the distant pastEverything 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.

JEANETTE WINTERSON is the author of eight novels, a short-story collection, a book of essays, and, most recently a children's picture book. She has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award. She lives in Oxfordshire and London.