Be prepared. Before you open this book, take a deep breath … it might be a while before you come up for air.

Jeanette Winterson has written both a gothic novel (The Daylight Gate) and a reimagined Shakespearean play (The Gap of Time) before. Both these skills are essential in this reimagining of Frankenstein.

The book begins with Mary Shelley, her poet husband, along with Lord Byron and hangers-on in Switzerland, where the group tell stories to relieve the boredom of a rained-out holiday. Shelley writes her famous novel but her life after Frankenstein unravels. Her fictional characters live on; her children die young.

The same characters, along with ‘Victor Stein’, reappear in different guises in the current day, in a playfully frenetic, erotic romp dealing with the issues around artificial intelligence. The modern narrator is trans scientist, Ry Shelley, male in a female body, who has had ‘upper surgery’, but not ‘lower’.

The structure of the novel mimics the sewn-together nature of Frankenstein’s monster: longer, more descriptive sentences of Romanticism next to the current era’s rapid-fire short sentences, interspersed with high-brow and low-brow quotes. Winterson has a deft touch.

A reimagined story is a form of creation and re-creation. There are Biblical allusions, with rain featuring heavily in the narrative, metaphorically referencing The Flood. Should we start over, be part human, part machine?

This is a study in binaries and the mind-body duality. The reader’s concepts of gender, faith, race and sexuality, along with reality are questioned. Mary Shelley might have asked us to question what it would be like to act as a god; Jeanette Winterson asks us – in this wild, wonderful ride – what it is to be human.

Reviewed by Bob Moore