The Gap of Time

A story of love and jealousy, tragedy and forgiveness, a lost child and a found family'A shining delight of a novel'New York Times'Clever and beautiful...it soars'Financial TimesA baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief.Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from - but she's about to find out.Jeanette Winterson's cover version of The Winter's Tale vibrates with echoes of Shakespeare's original and tells a story of hearts broken and hearts healed, a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that shows that whatever is lost shall be found.'Emotionally wrought and profoundly intelligent... A supremely clever, compelling and emotionally affecting novel that deserves multiple readings to appreciate its many layers'Mail on Sunday'There are passages here so concisely beautiful they give you goosebumps'Observer'Pulsates with such authenticity and imaginative generosity that I defy you not to engage with it'Independent

Long-listed for International Dublin Literary Award 2017 (UK)

“She makes us read on, our hearts in our mouths, to see how a twice-told story will turn out this time”

Publishers Weekly
The intricacy with which Winterson has plotted her novel against each Shakespearean detail will delight readers familiar with the original … it’s part of a vision of a world in which past, present, and future are lived simultaneously, original and adaptation existing in the same moment. The Times
A book of considerable beauty… Winterson’s fiction is a fine invitation into this deeply Shakespearean vision of imagination as the best kind of truth-telling -- Rowan Williams New Statesman
Winterson’s stage, like that of Shakespeare, is filled with wonders -- Frances Wilson Times Literary Supplement
Winterson is faithful to both the narrative and the spirit of the play, while transposing it to an utterly different and modern setting… There is lightness here, in the frisky prose and the author’s delight in invention, but you are never free of the awareness of dark shadows where danger and corruption lie in wait. -- Allan Massie Scotsman
Clever and beautiful...it soars Financial Times
A deeply felt, emotionally intelligent and serious novel, which resists easy answers and yet expresses the hope that human beings can muddle through, and that bad pasts can have good outcomes... Pulsates with such authenticity and imaginative generosity that I defy you not to engage with it. -- Andrew Dickson Independent
The Winter’s Tale, one of the late, 'problem' plays, is about loss, remorse and forgiveness, and the nature of time. Winterson has captured all this with respect and affection for Shakespeare’s text, and made it new with her own bold and poetic prose and her insights into love and grief. There are passages here so concisely beautiful they give you goosebumps. -- Lucasta Miller Radar
Emotionally wrought and profoundly intelligent it will pull you into its troubled, wise world of jealousy, paranoia, grief, revenge and forgiveness in some of the most stunning prose you’ll read this year … Winterson masterfully interweaves layers of narrative and themes so that reading the novel is like listening to a Bach prelude and fugue … A supremely clever, compelling and emotionally affecting novel that deserves multiple readings to appreciate its many layers. -- Hannah Beckerman Mail on Sunday
Engrossing, almost soapily addictive Independent

Jeanette Winterson OBE has written 10 novels, children's books, non-fiction and screenplays, and writes regularly for the Guardian. She was adopted by Pentecostal parents and raised in Manchester to be a missionary, which she wrote about in her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and twenty-seven years later in her bestselling memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The Winter's Tale tells the story of Perdita, the abandoned child. 'All of us have talismanic texts that we have carried around and that carry us around. I have worked with The Winter's Tale in many disguises for many years,' Jeanette says of the play. The result is The Gap of Time, her cover version.

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