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Winterlong (The Winterlong Trilogy) Kindle Edition

by Elizabeth Hand (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars 51 ratings
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The “sensuous and evocative” debut of the Nebula Award–winning author of Waking the Moon: A dystopian journey through a world unburdened by moral taboos (Library Journal).
 Set in the surreal, post-apocalyptic City of Trees, Winterlong centers on Wendy Wanders, a girl who can tap into the dreams and emotions of the people around her, and her long-lost twin brother, Raphael, a seductive, sacred courtesan to the City’s decadent elite. During their voyage, they encounter man-made and godlike monstrosities—both hideous and gorgeous—in their effort to stop an ancient power from consuming all. Blending science fiction and fantasy, Winterlong is a dark fairy tale about a land where societal and sexual taboos have disappeared, and what’s left is a world that is both lyrical and terrifying, familiar and striking. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Elizabeth Hand including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
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  1. Book 1 of 3
    The Winterlong Trilogy
  2. Print length
    447 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  5. Publisher
    Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
  6. Publication date
    October 30, 2012
  7. File size
    5622 KB
  8. Page Flip
    Enabled
  9. Word Wise
    Enabled
  10. Enhanced typesetting
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  11. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This first novel is a richly imagined work set in a Washington, D.C., devastated by nuclear and biological warfare. Society is rigidly stratified: the Ascendants, absentee rulers who were responsible for the devastation; the Curators, who tend the city's nearly destroyed museums and libraries; the Paphians, who barter sexual favors for goods; and the Lazars, wretched survivors of periodic germ warfare who subsist by cannibalism. The plot revolves around the reunification of twins separated in childhood: one, a male, is now a Paphian; the female is a "neurologically augmented empath specializing in emotive engram therapy." Hand's world is nuanced and believable and her characters, especially the female twin, come convincingly alive. Her attempts to imbue the plot with mythic sensibility, however, do not succeed, resulting in a good science fiction framework burdened with badly grafted elements of fantasy and the occult. The final scene, in which the incestuous reunion between the twins heralds the onset of a cataclysmic "Final Ascension," is disappointing in its murkiness.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In a far-future world where a post-holocaust civilization has created its own myths from the remnants of the past, a young woman genetically altered to feel others' emotions and a young man trained from birth as a sacred prostitute find themselves inexplicably drawn to each other as a mad dictator schemes to bring about the "Final Ascension." Sensuous and evocative, this first novel combines dreamlike images with powerful characters to produce a visionary masterpiece. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B009O3ZQQW
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (October 30, 2012)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 30, 2012
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 5622 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 447 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars 51 ratings

About the author

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Elizabeth Hand

Elizabeth Hand

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A couple of years after seeing Patti Smith perform, Elizabeth Hand flunked out of college and became involved in the nascent punk scenes in DC and NYC. From 1979 to 1986 she worked at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air & Space Museum; she was eventually readmitted to university to study cultural anthropology, and received her B.A. She is the author of many novels, including Winterlong, Waking the Moon (Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award-Winner), Glimmering, and Mortal Love, and three collections of stories, including the recent Saffron and Brimstone. Her fiction has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopeoic, Tiptree, and International Horror Guild Awards, and her novels have been chose as New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books. She has also been awarded a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship. A regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Hand lives with her family on the Maine Coast.

Customer reviews

3.7 out of 5 stars
3.7 out of 5
51 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Amber L.T .
4.0 out of 5 stars If you like weird fiction, this is one for you.
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2021
Verified Purchase
Extremely weird, but well written and interesting. It's hard to describe everything that goes on in this book - there is just too much for a concise recap in my opinion. I was disturbed, but I liked it.
One person found this helpful
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john c
5.0 out of 5 stars She is ALWAYS great !
Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2022
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Really enjoy reading her.
A total author.
Yes… I buy cheap books, but I will try to buy my favorites when I can.
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Dyanne
4.0 out of 5 stars Gripping yet ultimately unfulfilling
Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2002
I truly enjoy Hand's writing - lyrical, expressive and detailed. As an example of her early work, this novel is a phenomenal piece of writing. Her characters are magnificent and she breaks just about every taboo you can think of without losing her sense of style. However, I found the ending to drag slightly, as she had left a great many loose ends to tie up. At this point I often found myself loosing sight of the plot. Certainly worth a read, but I would recommend Aestival Tide and Glimmering over it.
5 people found this helpful
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AngieB
2.0 out of 5 stars Complex story she just couldn't deliver on...
Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2012
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I really, really wanted desperately to love this book. The bones for a phenomenal story were there. They were right there waiting to be used. The characters had the potential for much depth. The society set up did as well. To me, the downfall of this book was too much emphasis on minute setting/environment description and not enough on storytelling and character development. I felt like I had just started to get to know and understand the two main characters at the end of the book.I mean the very end. It took me that long to BEGIN to absorb the extremely complex world she was try to jam into the reader in much too large of pieces. That's what it felt like, like being forced to swallow too much food at once, too fast. That world and its story just wouldn't all fit the way she was trying to feed it to the reader and forget being sorted and broken down into enjoyable pieces.

I like the characters. I like the idea. But in order to pull off a story with such a very complicated plot and setting, the author must be, above all, a good storyteller. Hand has a beautiful Dickens-esque quality to her descriptive writing but she needs to pull her story together into a cohesive piece that can be understood and absorbed by the reader. I didn't feel compelled either by being lightly floated through the story or plowing through it in excitement or invested so much that I turned the pages w/ apprehension or even swept away. I know it's too late now but I'd love to see her rewrite this. Sit down and really invest in the story in its entirety.

One last thing, this actually irritated me a quite a bit. You had an entire section of the society you created dedicated to the pleasures of the flesh but yet you could not or would not write a decent sex or lovemaking scene? You cannot say that you didn't want it to take away from the story itself because it was already a part of it. You chose to have these Houses as part of the story, a big part yet you did not take the reader into their world at all. You couldn't even write effectively enough about the main character's struggles with sex to make the reader get how significant that piece was. Why shy away from that when it's such a big part of the world you built?

Again, so much potential but it just didn't deliver.
27 people found this helpful
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SapphireSkies
3.0 out of 5 stars Bizarre future world grows gruesome
Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2021
Verified Purchase
Winterlong is narrated in alternating sections by two 17-year-olds: Wendy Wanders, beautiful yet psychically altered by the Ascendants to perform empathic therapy on patients that does not always end as intended, and Raphael Miramar, equally beautiful and raised to satisfy the sexual desires of his Patron and just about anyone else. Wendy's world consists of the Human Engineering Lab (HEL), its doctors, and her fellow "empties" who are told they have no emotions of their own, while Raphael lives in a world of the five Houses of the Paphians who worship the Magdalene and Desire, and the Curators who preserve the City's museums, zoo, and other remnants of today's Washington, D.C., along with indulging their lusts by way of the Paphians. Outside of both live the lazars, human victims of viral strikes who don't survive long or well, along with geneslaves and aardmen, presumably the products of biological experimentation, all three waiting to prey on the better off. And then there is the Boy in the Tree, tempting and godlike and horrifying. The origins of this strange future society are not explained.

The story is well-written, but requires the reader to piece these worlds together and includes abundant use of obscure, archaic, scientific, and future tech words that constantly sent me to the dictionary to sort them out. Wendy and Raphael begin as sympathetic characters, then grow and change in ways that make one more human and the other monstrous. If you are uncomfortable with necrophilia, rape, and the gruesome deaths of innocents, this book is not for you. I'm still unsure what to make of the mystical and oddly optimistic, though indecisive, ending. But I doubt I'll read the sequels, as this dystopia edges too close to sheer horror for my taste.

Oh, and the Kindle version has a zillion typos, mostly stray punctuation marks. Someone needs to copy edit and update the e-book.
7 people found this helpful
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70ms
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is like an old friend
Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2013
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I'm glad they finally made an e-book of Winterlong; I read it many years ago and really loved it. A few years ago I picked up a used copy on that big auction site.

If you like post-apocalyptic fantasy, you will likely enjoy this book; however there are some pretty strong themes throughout around incest, prostitution, etc. so bear that in mind. It's definitely a book that will make you think, though, and stay with you.
6 people found this helpful
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