Product Description

Canongate Books, together with thirty great international publishing houses, is proud to announce a new series - "The Myths". It is backed by an international marketing and PR campaign. The national media partner is already lined up in the UK. Jeanette Winterson will be touring the UK. In ancient Greek mythology Atlas, a member of the original race of gods called Titans, leads a rebellion against the new deities, the Olympians. For this he incurs divine wrath: the victorious Olympians force Atlas, guardian of the Garden of Hesperides and its golden apples of life, to bear the weight of the earth and the heavens for eternity. When the hero Heracles, as one of his famous twelve labours, is tasked with stealing these apples, he seeks out Atlas, offering to shoulder the world temporarily if the Titan will bring him the fruit. Knowing that Heracles is the only person with the strength to take this burden, and enticed by the prospect of even a short-lived freedom, Atlas agrees and an uneasy partnership is born. With her typical wit and verve, Jeanette Winterson brings Atlas into the twenty-first century. Simultaneously, she asks her own difficult questions about the nature of choice and coercion, and how we forge our own destiny, Visionary and inventive, yet completely believable and relevant to our lives today, Winterson's skill in turning the familiar on its head and showing us a different truth is once more put to dazzling effect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #482305 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 151 pages

Review
"The most ambitious simultaneous worldwide publication ever undertaken." The Times"

About the Author
JEANETTE WINTERSON'S first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit won the Whitbread prize for Best First Novel. Since then she has published seven other novels, including The Passion, Written on the Body and The Powerbook, a collection of short stories, The World and Other Place: A Book of Essays, Art Objects and most recently a children's picture book, The King of Capri. She has adapted her work for TV, film and stage. Her books are published in 32 countries. She lives in Oxfordshire and London.

Customer Reviews

A Story about Story
Now on to much weightier matters. Winterson takes a much different approach than Atwood. She tells this tale as herself telling her tale retelling a tale. Confusing? No not really. She begins with herself, tells the story of Heracles ad Atlas and then returns to her own life and lessons learnt.

Unlike the Penelopiad, this book Weight is very dark and brooding and leaves one with a feeling of unease as if we missed something, or even that in reading this book, like Pandora, we have opened a box and cannot now close it and will be forever different. Though we are not sure how.

How does Winterson accomplish this? In this deep brooding book she touches something primal inside. Much as Heracles is awoken and bothered by the question "Why? Why? Why?" this question arises and will not let him go.

So too, this book will awaken questions in your mind and your spirit, and maybe, just maybe, if we are lucky, in this book we will find the questions to lift our weight. If we can learn from it to tell our story we can be freed, and step out from under the burden on our shoulders, as Atlas so desperately desired.

(First published in Imprint 2005-11-05 as `Myth Novels')