"McAvan's text does not disappoint in the insights it offers. As well as creating a thorough and informative study of Winterson's major works, McAvan also succeeds in her overall aim - to establish that, with a reappearance of the divine in the secular cultural space of postmodernism, Winterson creates an art of major import through a "return of the sacred in the post-secular world" (170)." -- Contemporary Women's Writing "Emily McAvan incisively interrogates a theme conspicuous by its absence in most extant criticism of Winterson's writing: the fierce interplay of religion with sexuality, gender and power. Here queerness and holiness are interwoven as visionary, and Winterson herself is claimed as prophetic. In this expansive book, McAvan highlights Winterson's generative deconstruction of binaries such as secular and sacred, sameness and otherness, belief and unbelief, and identifies her as a perceptive religious thinker." -- Susannah Cornwall, Senior Lecturer in Constructive Theologies, University of Exeter "At long last a powerful study of a queer and feminist writer that brings the body and the spirit together. In this finely written book Em McAvan turns to the postmodern sacred to provide a rigorous theoretical framework for a reading of Jeanette Winterson's novels of lesbian and bisexual love." -- Vijay Mishra, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Murdoch University, Australia.