Personally, I find Jeanette Winterson to be a quite self-centered and philisophically winded writer, counterbalanced only by her intensely powerful infusions of dry wit, which make the whole book worthwhile.

This one is a bit of a slow start (not necessarily a good thing for a short novel) but once you get to the repartee between Atlas and Heracles, the rest of the book is worth the read, barring a few discontinuous chapters interjecting aspects of the narrator which I find completely inconsequential to the enjoyment of whole of the novel, though, symbolically, I’m sure they mean all sorts of fancy things about the re-invention of self. I just don’t care much for any of the incarnations of Jeanette Winterson’s “self”.