Gut Symmetries

The highwire artist of the English novel redraws the romantic triangle for the post-Einsteinian universe, where gender is as elastic as matter, and any accurate Grand Unified Theory (GUT) must encompass desire alongside electromagnetism and gravity

"One of our most brilliant, visionary storytellers."  -  San Francisco Chronicle

One starry night on a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Alice, a brilliant English theoretical physicist, begins an affair with Jove, her remorselessly seductive American counterpart. But Jove is married. When Alice confronts his wife, Stella, she swiftly falls in love with her, with consequences that are by turns horrifying, comic, and arousing. 

Vaulting from Liverpool to New York, from alchemy to string theory, and from the spirit to the flesh, Gut Symmetries is a thrillingly original novel by England's most flamboyantly gifted young writer. 

"Winterson is unmatched among contemporary writers in her ability to conjure up new-world wonder...A beautiful, stirring and brilliant story." -  Times Literary Supplement

"Beyond comparison…. Few writers can contend with Jeanette Winterson…. She writes like a demon drunk with love, and if there’s a sentence in Gut Symmetries that doesn’t startle readers with its bravery and wit, then they’re not reading hard enough."  –  The Chronicle-Journal

Gut Symmetries is a collage of memories, snippets of scientific theory, meditations on abstract concepts like truth, and the events surrounding Jove, Alice, and Stella's affair. This is a book that demands your attention, jumping as it does from one seemingly tangential topic to another; but whereas physics still seeks a grand unification theory (GUT) to explain how everything in the universe fits together, Jeanette Winterson actually finds one of her own in this satisfyingly complete fictional world.