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Frankissstein
A Love Story
Length
7 hours 10 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
John Sackville & Perdita Weeks
Since her astonishing debut at twenty-five with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has achieved worldwide critical and commercial success as “one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time” (Elle). Her new novel, Frankissstein, is an audacious love story that weaves together disparate lives into an exploration of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and queer love.
Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mom again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead … but waiting to return to life.
What will happen when homo sapiens is no longer the smartest being on the planet? In fiercely intelligent prose, Jeanette Winterson shows us how much closer we are to that future than we realize. Funny and furious, bold and clear-sighted, Frankissstein is a love story about life itself.
Jeanette Winterson, CBE, was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out. Discovering early the power of books she left home at sixteen to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at twenty-five. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. Twenty-seven years later she revisited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written ten novels for adults, as well as children’s books, nonfiction, and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London. She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.
John Sackville is an English actor and voice artist. He studied at St. Andrews University and the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. He has since acted on stage and on camera and has narrated a number of audiobooks, computer games, documentaries, and commercials.
Perdita Weeks is a voice talent and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator.
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Reviews
“Frankissstein is very funny. There has always been a fine line between horror and high camp, and this is a boundary that Winterson gleefully exploits.”
“Highly inventive…Lyrical, gloriously raunchy, pulpy and absurd.”
“A hold-on-to-your hat modern-day horror story about very modern-day neuroses and issues.”
“Beguiling, disturbing, and full of wonders.”
“Magnificent…This vividly imagined and gorgeously constructed novel will have readers laughing out loud—and then pondering their personhood and mortality on the next page.”
“Winterson draws a direct line from Mary Shelley to a trans doctor bedeviled by his mad scientist lover, the march of progress, and the occasional sexbot in this funny, incisive triumph.”
“An inventive, intelligent, bawdy novel that’s a bit like a literary playground. It has everything: Mary Shelley, A.I., sex dolls, cryogenics labs and some of the funniest writing we’ve come across this year. And of course, it’s a love story.”
“Pulls a totemic story into the twenty-first century.”
“A book that seeks to shift our perspective on humanity and the purpose of being human in the most darkly entertaining way… gloriously well observed.”
“Ingeniously reimagines the Mary Shelley legend as a wild meditation on identity and the body.”
“Fizzes with ideas and originality…alive with new and contemporary ideas about whom we love and where humanity is headed.”
“A brilliant amalgamation of scholarship and comedy.”
“Perdita Weeks resoundingly enlivens the peripatetic nineteenth-century brood…And John Sackville embodies a new cast—but are they?—who initially converge at Tech-X-Po in Memphis…This repertoire is so admirably distinctive listeners may wonder if an uncredited third reader occasionally commandeered the recording…Winterson’s inventive latest gets memorably animated via two can’t-be-ignored, seasoned narrators.”
“Narrators John Sackville and Perdita Weeks expertly deliver the two time frames of this inventive novel…Weeks’s voice has a soft pitch and a longing tone, while Sackville offers an array of voices and accents.”
“Frankissstein is intellectually bracing and sexually explicit; a historical literary romp and a futuristic thriller.”
“Sparky, funny, and finely calibrated to ask weighty questions with the lightest of touches…beautifully written.”
“Complex and spellbinding…artfully structured, unexpectedly funny, and impressively dynamic.”
“[A] bold and humorous narrative…Highly recommended.”
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