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A captivating collection of ghost stories from "one of the most gifted writers working today" (New York Times), Night Side of the River is as ingeniously provocative as it is downright spooky.
In this delightfully chilling collection, the iconic Jeanette Winterson turns her fearless gaze to the realm of ghosts, interspersing her own encounters with the supernatural alongside hair-raising fictions. Lifting the veil between the living and the dead, Winterson spirits us away to a haunted estate that ensnares a nomadic young couple in its own dark past, a staged immersive ghost tour gone awry, a West Village séance that threatens the bounds between AI and reality, and a vacation home in the metaverse where a widow visits an improved version of her deceased husband. Gloriously gothic and unnervingly contemporary, Winterson examines grief, revenge, and the myriad ways in which technology can disrupt the boundary between life and death.
What are you reading this week (1/2/2025)?
In keeping with a stated goal on another thread, I've already dnf'd two books. I'm listening to Night Side of the River: Ghost Stories by Jeanette Winterson. Started a six-month buddy read of The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Just started The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi...
-Anne_Glasgow
"Memorable…These supernatural tales are satisfyingly disconcerting." —Publishers Weekly
"Winterson somehow manages to make ghosts boring." —Kirkus Reviews
"A bewitching collection for readers of horror and mystery, with just the right twists." —Booklist
"A collection of ghost stories that range from campfire-level spooks to speculative reflections on the meaning of life...As challenging and entertaining as anything undertaken by this endlessly ingenious writer." —Los Angeles Times
"Winterson's stories...are excellent contemporary examples of how often women have made supernatural fiction their own." —The Washington Post
"Ghost stories that reinvigorate the supernatural...Winterson avoids pastiche, largely through the steady release of intensely portrayed and skillfully deployed emotion." —The Guardian
This information about Night Side of the River was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester. She is a beloved cultural icon and queer trailblazer who published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and three collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. Her novel Written on the Body was named one of the 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature by the New York Times. Since her innovative and forward-thinking writing about AI in her essay collection 12 Bytes, she speaks at tech conferences around the world. She is professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester and writes a...
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