Written on the Body
  • Published: 6 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9780099598275
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99

Written on the Body

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The best of Jeanette Winterson's remarkable, radical and genre-expanding novels, reissued in a bold new look ahead of the publication of her new book, 12 BYTES

'This book is a deep, sensual plunge, a worship of the body, inside and out' The Times


In a quiet English suburb, a love affair ignites. For our nameless narrator, Louise is the last in a long line of explosive passions, but the first to have broken their heart. With Louise's husband, Elgin, blocking love's course, their affair is doomed to unravel - until, that is, a terrible choice must be made.
With its witty and masterful prose, Written on the Body takes the reader on a beguiling and defying exploration of love and its physical forms.

'An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body' Sunday Telegraph
  • Published: 6 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9780099598275
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99
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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.

portrait photo of Jeanette Winterson

Also by Jeanette Winterson

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Night Side of the River
12 Bytes
Hansel and Greta
Frankissstein
Love
Christmas Days
See all

Praise for Written on the Body

Part love story, part philosophical treatise, part anatomical guide, Written on the Body defies categorisation, dispensing with clichés and stereotypes to forge, from the raw physicality of the body itself, a new language for love.

Jamei Qautro, Guardian

An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body...the result is a work that is consistently revelatory about the phenomenon of love

New York Times Book Review

Winterson's novels are about exploding our complacent notions of the real, breaking down received ideas of gender, time and space... John Donne wrote, "Love...makes one little room, as everywhere." Winterson's novel arrives at a similar affirmation

Time Out

Part love story, part philosophical treatise, part anatomical guide, Written on the Body defies categorisation, dispensing with clichés and stereotypes to forge, from the raw physicality of the body itself, a new language for love.

Jamei Qautro, Guardian
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