‘Her Imagination was one of the most dazzling this century’ MARINA WALKER, INDEPENDENT
‘The way to Carter’s visionary and lurid world’ THE TIMES
‘The darting, lyrical pen of Angela Carter, mistress of the erotic picaresque’ KIRKUS REVIEWS
‘I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman’s shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself . . . ‘
New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman’s fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.
This story follows Evelyn along a journey through mythology and sexuality. It is a story of how he learns to be a woman, first in the brutal hands of Zero, the ragtime Nietzsche, then through the ancient Tristessa, the beautiful ghost of Hollywood past.
