Gut Symmetries

Lecturing to tourists aboard the QE2 in Gut Symmetries, Alice, a brilliant young Oxford physicist, meets and falls in love with an older colleague, Jove. But when Jove's wife learns of the affair and seduces Alice herself, a destructive love triangle is born, one that will have its macabre denouement at sea. In Jeanette Winterson's beguiling sixth novel, fascinating fragments of physics, astrology, Jewish mysticism, and 15th-century alchemy are fused into a love story. Only when several of the many narrative coincidences, parallels, and ghostly apparitions ultimately prove to be gratuitous does the novel's haunted effect devolve into self-conscious posturing. B