Post by @federicabalbi

The PowerBook reads like poetry, as a place to go back to. It is a little volume where to get lost, and then start again from any point.

There is a fancy-dress shop in an old London House, near where Jack the Ripper was said to have lived. Masked as such, the shop is the place to get a story, a tailored story to be lived, where you can obtain ‘freedom just for one day’. The narrator types it, and characters melt through time and space into other stories, all true and fiction at the same time.

Jeanette Winterson twists boundaries of narrative – or those that are normally considered as acceptable boundaries in most narratives – to build a composite book where characters are possibly just forms. In her high literary style, a contemporary romance is compared, overlapped and fused into other stories, some archetypical ones, some that have been sacred by tradition, some that have been newly invented, each probably drawn from yet another story.

A book that has the power to rock the reader through worlds as different from each other as they can be, but that always hold at their core what can be seen as the most universal of human experiences: the quest for love.