The Daylight Gate

If you like her other novels, you will adore this. She has done her homework... the beauty of the writing, exemplary in its pared-down simplicity. It’s so seductive that by the middle I was hooked.

Independent

Sharp-eyed view of history... Winterson is at her best her when she’s dealing with real horrors.

Observer

This is a dazzling book. Winterson is a deft storyteller and a writer of wonderful economy. It is one of the very few contemporary novels that I actually wished were longer.

Literary Review

A book worth reading – utterly compulsive, thick with atmosphere and dread, but sharp intelligence too...Ultimately she combines compelling history and poetic dialogue with suspense...This rather more sophisticated story would make a particularly vivid film.

Telegraph

Winterson seamlessly blends history with fiction... The Daylight Gate is an enthralling story unfussily told, I read it all in one sitting, only wishing there were more.

Evening Standard

Winterson weaves history with fiction in this atmospheric and totally captivating novel. Cancel your plans, you won't want to put this down.

Daily Express

Told with the author’s usual aplomb and should appeal to her many fans.

Daily Mail

This dark story with its fantastical trappings of magick and mysticism, its strong women and wild, Lancastrian setting is Winterson’s natural habitat and she maps it with relish, weaving Shakespearean themes of ambiguous love affairs conducted by shape-shifting, androgynous lovers around the dire squalor superstition and sheer desperation revealed by the bleak facts of the trial...Filled with Winterson’s characteristic intelligence and energy... lively and enjoyable.

New Statesman

Beautifully written.

Independent on Sunday

Winterson lavishly embroiders a tale rich in Gothic supernatural touches... In a feverish climate, where fear of women and their sexuality often translated into rape and persecution, Winterson creates a deliciously dreadful tale that cleverly blurs the line between real and imagined horror.

Metro

A real page-turner

Woman’s Own

This is horror for the thinking person…compelling’

Saga

Sexy, terrifying and beautifully written, as you would expect.

Esther Freud, Daily Mail

It is also one of the lead titles in the launch of Hammer books, and boy have they hit the ground at a most appropriate run. While it doesn't seem to be the typical Jeanette Winterson novel, it does feature religious intolerance and lesbian sex, and neither are new to her oeuvre. Nor is a northern setting, nor a look at the bending of truth and fantasy, and the wish-fulfilment of those wanting more. So this is not just a case of an author following a commission, but it almost seems to be, so brilliantly has Winterson followed the Hammer tradition. Here are black masses, dark spells, heaving bosoms and evil not as some tremendous CGI effect, but starting from something as base as bigotry. Only the fact the characters seem like real people and not stereotypical yokels stops this from creating that lost Hammer classic in the reader's mind.

The Bookbag