The Gap of Time

The Winter’s Tale Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

By: Jeanette Winterson

Narrated by: Ben Onwukwe, Mark Bazeley, Penelope Rawlins

‘I saw the strangest sight tonight.’


New Bohemia. America. A storm. A black man finds a white baby abandoned in the night. He gathers her up – light as a star – and decides to take her home.


London. England. After the financial crash. Leo Kaiser knows how to make money but he doesn’t know how to manage the jealousy he feels towards his best friend and his wife. Is his newborn baby even his?

New Bohemia. 17 years later. A boy and a girl are falling in love but there’s a lot they don’t know about who they are and where they come from.


Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of the original but tells a contemporary story where Time itself is a player in a game of high stakes that will either end in tragedy or forgiveness. It shows us that however far we have been separated, whatever is lost shall be found.

Critic reviews

She makes us read on, our hearts in our mouths, to see how a twice-told story will turn out this time

The intricacy with which Winterson has plotted her novel against each Shakespearean detail will delight readers familiar with the original … it’s part of a vision of a world in which past, present, and future are lived simultaneously, original and adaptation existing in the same moment.

A book of considerable beauty… Winterson’s fiction is a fine invitation into this deeply Shakespearean vision of imagination as the best kind of truth-telling (Rowan Williams)

Winterson’s stage, like that of Shakespeare, is filled with wonders (Frances Wilson)

Winterson is faithful to both the narrative and the spirit of the play, while transposing it to an utterly different and modern setting… There is lightness here, in the frisky prose and the author’s delight in invention, but you are never free of the awareness of dark shadows where danger and corruption lie in wait. (Allan Massie)

Clever and beautiful...it soars

A deeply felt, emotionally intelligent and serious novel, which resists easy answers and yet expresses the hope that human beings can muddle through, and that bad pasts can have good outcomes... Pulsates with such authenticity and imaginative generosity that I defy you not to engage with it. (Andrew Dickson)

The Winter’s Tale, one of the late, 'problem' plays, is about loss, remorse and forgiveness, and the nature of time. Winterson has captured all this with respect and affection for Shakespeare’s text, and made it new with her own bold and poetic prose and her insights into love and grief. There are passages here so concisely beautiful they give you goosebumps. (Lucasta Miller)

Emotionally wrought and profoundly intelligent it will pull you into its troubled, wise world of jealousy, paranoia, grief, revenge and forgiveness in some of the most stunning prose you’ll read this year … Winterson masterfully interweaves layers of narrative and themes so that reading the novel is like listening to a Bach prelude and fugue … A supremely clever, compelling and emotionally affecting novel that deserves multiple readings to appreciate its many layers. (Hannah Beckerman)

Engrossing, almost soapily addictive

A fine reworking of The Winter's Tale, but ...

Where does The Gap of Time rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Hard to say. I like the narrative--the novel is a lovely reworking of Shakespeare's wonderful odd pastoral romnance the Winter's Tale, but the narration is mixed, and much of it is awful, irritating.

What did you like best about this story?

The narrative and the weirdness of the genre that is romance.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of the narrators?

I don't know. There are several narrators. Perdita is ghastly, as is Xeno (Polixenes), as is Pauline (Paulina). Perdita's voice is squeaky and irritatingly childlike for a 16-year-old (or is she 18?). Her Southern American accent struck me as unconvincing, but it's not as bad as Xeno's upper-class English twit accent/tone. I stuck it out because I wanted to know what happened, but my advice would be choose the print version for this one. Pity.

Time

Jeanette Winterson always offers something beautiful and poetic, The Gap of Time, is no exception. Creative, interesting, sad, funny and poignant. I’m obsessed with time - so this was even more so of interest for me.