Art And Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd [Paperback]

Jeanette Winterson's novel Arts & Lies begins with three people seated opposite each other on a train as it winds out of a city, making its way past cemeteries and houses towards the sea. Handel, a Catholic doctor, clutches a book, worrying at the edges of his medical mistakes. Picasso, a young woman with a consuming desire to paint, runs from abuse by her brother, with his "bull's balls and Lucifer rod". Sappho, seducer of women, carries her whirling words of poetry quietly at her side. Art & Lies intimately unravels the stories of these three. Although strangers, their memories touch and dance, circling a handful of events in which they have met (unbeknown to them) as the carriages of the train flit in and out of the sunlight.

At times the writing is impenetrable--there are paragraphs of French, Latin and German, a section of a Strauss opera and an impossibly demanding twist on language that feels mannered and fragmented. Often though, there is a lyrical intensity, a poetic eroticism to reward the struggle. There is also a light-heartedness; Winterson's particular, peculiar sense of fun, seen at its best in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry asserts itself here in the raunchy narrative of Isaac Newton's prostitute that leaps up from the pages of Handel's book. Art & Lies is one of Winterson's most ruthless experimentations with literary form that shows her at her exuberant best and worst. --Jane Honey

'Winterson's belief in love, beauty, and most of all, language, is evangelical and redemptive...it is timely and exciting to read' Rachel Cusk, The Times

'There is no such thing as autobiography, there is only art and lies' Set in a London of the near future, its three principal characters, Handel, Picasso and Sappho, seperately flee the city and find themselves on the same train, drawn to one another through the curious agency of a book. Stories within stories take us through the unlikely love-affairs of one Doll Sneerpiece, an 18th century bawd, and into the world of painful beauty where language has the power to heal. ART & LIES is a question and a quest: How shall I live?

'If we want language to be handled with vitality and suppleness, if we want to consider serious questions of philosophy, art and sexuality, if we want writers to aspire to beauty, then we should be glad of Jeanette Winterson... she is a writer who will continue to astonish, to please and to vex. Art & Lies does all these things' Cressida Connelly, Literary Review

Set in a London of the near future, Art & Lies' three principal characters, Handel, Picasso and Sappho, separately flee the city and find themselves on the same train, drawn to one another through the curious agency of a book. Stories within stories take us through the unlikely love-affairs of one Doll Sneerpiece, an eighteenth-century bawd, and into the world of painful beauty where language has the power to heal. Art & Lies is a question and a quest: How shall I live?

'Brave and ambitious' Independent

Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of ten novels, including Oranges are not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry; a book of short stories, The World and Other Places; a collection of essays, Art Objects as well as many other works, including children's books, screenplays and journalism. Her writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Prix d'argent at Cannes Film Festival.