The Passion

I’m slightly cheating with this one because it’s a re-read. I first read The Passion last year and have the feeling it’s going to be one of those books I re-read again and again, in the way you sometimes crave your favourite food. 

It’s set during the Napoleonic wars, which makes it sound incredibly historically dry, but it’s the absolute opposite. Winterson writes with the magical realist imagination of Angela Carter, but with more clarity and distilled philosophy – sharp, universal truths that pierce your heart.

The Passion roams through France, Russia, and Venice, and unfolds through the lives of… show more.

In my opinion, one of the finest living writers in the English language, Winterson masterfully spins a tale of historical, poetic, eccentric, dreamy and highly sensual, and gender-bending eroticism involving an androgynous hero during the Napoleonic era, and taking place in the kitchens of the emperor, on the battlefield and along the freezing march into Russia, as well as amid the canals of Venice. Always thought-provoking and rife with magical realism and plain heart-stopping imagery, tension, and poetry, Winterson tells her story in a manner that will—if not change your ideas about everything—certainly challenge them. I… show more.

"What you risk reveals what you value." This struck me so deeply when I first read it that I quote it to this day.

The Passion is a gorgeous, baroque, desperate symphony of a book. A love story spanning time and place, against the odds. The writing elevates the grotesque and disturbing to art. It leads you by the hand through the giddy, opulent confusion of Venice at Carnival and freezes you in the wintery depths of Napoleonic despair. It was one of the first books I read in my teens that was overtly queer and played with gender identity.… show more.