Aboard the QE2 and under the stars, three lives converge. Two physicists - Jove, a married man, and Alice, a single woman - meet and commence an affair, only for Alice to fall in love with Jove's wife, Stella, a poet. Winterson captures all three sides of this triangle of desire - and the rich history that has brought them together - with her prodigious passion and intellect.

Encompassing ideas that reach from the Greeks to the Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) of modern physics, Winterson incorporates the entire universe from Liverpool to New York, from quarks to cosmos - in a novel of sex and the spirit, the real and the fantastic, male and female, science and religion, and love in all its frailty and excess.