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  • Published: 21 January 2020
  • ISBN: 9781784709952
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $22.99

Frankissstein

A Love Story




A radical love story for right now, from 'one of the most gifted writers working today' (New York Times)


***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019***
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020**
**LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2020**

'Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.'
Inspired by Mary Shelley's gothic classic Frankenstein, discover this audacious new novel about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire.

As Brexit grips Britain, Ry, a young transgender doctor, is falling in love. The object of their misguided affection: the celebrated AI-specialist, Professor Victor Stein. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his Mum again, is set to make his fortune with a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere.

Ranging from 1816, when nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley pens her radical first novel, to a cryonics facility in present-day Arizona where the dead wait to return to life, Frankissstein shows us how much closer we are to the future than we realise.

'Intelligent and inventive...very funny' The Times

'One of the most gifted writers working today' New York Times

  • Published: 21 January 2020
  • ISBN: 9781784709952
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out.

Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited 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 lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.

She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.

Also by Jeanette Winterson

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Praise for Frankissstein

Winterson reboots Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for the 21st Century, launching us into a hold-on-to-your hat modern-day horror story about very modern-day neuroses and issues.

Rebecca Thomas, BBC News

Yes, the book we have all been waiting for. Yes, everything Winterson has always done so well. Yes, above and beyond anything that is yet to be written.

Daisy Johnson

Astonishing. Bold. Teeming with wit and intellectual prowess. Winterson is a literary giant. She remains one of my favourite writers.

Irenosen Okojie

Intelligent and inventive… Frankisstein is very funny. There has always been a fine line between horror and high camp, and this is a boundary that Winterson gleefully exploits.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

Refreshingly, Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein… is a wildly inventive reimagining of one of science fiction’s most beloved stories… lyrical, gloriously raunchy, pulpy and absurd.

Helen Marshall, New Scientist

Winterson writes in many forms then, but always with complete verve and disarming self-confidence… readers are in deft hands with Winterson. It helps that it’s a lighter read than you might expect: the schlocky history of Frankenstein and its many film spin-offs have given her permission to have some fun. And the sex robot business is truly hilarious.

AN Devers, Prospect

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.

Daisy Hay, Financial Times

A clever comic romp that teases at the nature — and future — of life, death and what it is to be human, without ever being ponderous… [Frankissstein is] first-rate.

Daily Mail

Winterson has had a surge of inventivenessFrankissstein gamely links arms with the zeitgeist. 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 .. I found myself vibrating with laughter.

Johanna Thomas-Corr, Observer, Book of the Day

Funny and philosophical… This is a love story about life itself from a gifted writer.

Psychologies

Here, hard science and dreamy Romanticism exist in both tension and harmonyFrankissstein abounds with invention… this is a work of both pleasure and profundity, robustly and skilfully structured, and suffused with all Winterson’s usual preoccupations – gender, language, sexuality, the limits of individual liberty and the life of ideas.

Sam Byers, Guardian, *Book of the Week*

A surprisingly funny novel… [and] characters…[are] well-rounded, with unexpected layers.

Rhian Drinkwater, SFX

Highly satisfying.

Claire Allfree, Daily Telegraph

Winterson’s witty and imaginatively plotted novel is a dizzying tour of future possibilities… Timely and thought-provoking, Frankisstein raises questions about the role of out bodies, the future of relationships, and, ultimately what it means to be human.

Anna Matthews, Diva

Shot through with references from Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare and TS Eliot, Winterson’s latest offering has a flavour of classical legend. She makes the world afresh, whole emphasising the human need for super-human figure and god-like intelligence is eternal.

Daily Express

An essential read for now.

Marta Bausells, ELLE

Winterson always pushes boundaries with her writing and this novel is no different.

Joanne Finney, Good Housekeeping

Winterson’s bold novel asks old questions about the body’s possibilities in a provocative new way.

Sharmaine Lovegrove, Sunday Times

Playfully allusive and relentlessly readable, it’s a book so wild and fizzing with ideas you feel it might actually pop.

Anthony Cummins, Metro

Playful and inventive… There is a merged ocean of thought with [Frankisstein]; ideas slip between characters and time frames. Frankisstein reincarnates as it evolves, each part deepening the part before it.

Rozalind Dineen, Times Literary Supplement

A weird and engaging and extremely funny take on Shelley’s classic… The book seeks to shift our perspective on humanity, I think, and the purpose of being… Technology today is allowing us to shape our notions of sex and gender; tomorrow, it will shape our end.

Judie Bindel, UnHerd

I'm awestruck, as always, by Jeanette Winterson…. Frankissstein…is a dazzlingly bonkers reworking of Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein, featuring artificial intelligence, sex robots and sci-fi experiments.

Laura Bailey, Vogue

Frankisstein leaps from the Peterloo Massacre to contemporary bioethical speculation to nineteenth-century Bedlam to early computers, its eager, passionately clever narrator always plunging enthusiastically ahead, like the mysterious giant figure Mary Shelley glimpsed racing across that icy glacier.

Michèle Roberts, Tablet, *Book of the Week*

An oft-moving, oft-hilarious retelling of Shelley’s much-retold classic.

Maria Crawford, Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2019*

Winterson teases away at…boundaries – between genders, life and death, fact and fiction, human and machine – to great, and hugely entertaining effect.

Daily Mail, *Summer reads of 2019*

Jeanette Winterson’s latest book is a shape-shifting, time-hopping gem of a novel… Reading one of Winterson’s books is like going on a magic carpet ride through her subconscious… her stories are creative, overflowing with ideas, and shot through with her wicked sense of humour.

James Lloyd, Science Focus

Rich, thoughtful, and entertaining… [a] heady combination of literary history, futurology, and romance.

Dougal Jeffries, BJGP

An utterly brilliant book from one of the most talented writers of the moment

Handbook

A modern take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it’s a fascinating and engrossing look at AI, science, gender fluidity and, ultimately, what it really means to be human.

Nicola Sturgeon, New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

Frankissstein not only draws on the stories of real contemporary research around artificial intelligence and cryogenics, but also features historical figures and their compelling stories of scientific insight and discovery… I've read much of Winterson's work over the years and it seems to me she re-awakened the literary playfulness of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry with this offering.

Chemistry World

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