Gut Symmetries, by Jeanette Winterson (Granta, £5.99 in UK)

Few books are utterly baffling, but I'm afraid I had to give up on this one. Winterson is unquestionably a writer of great technical brilliance, and the individual parts of this novel - "a celebration of love in all its faults, confusion and excess", burbles the blurb happily - are spun out of a pure golden language that must, once, have been English. Alas, knitting them together proved to be the problem. After innumerable dropped stitches and gaping holes I should really have begun all over again, but couldn't bear to. To compound my misery, everyone else seems to think it's a work of genius. But hey: cannibalism? A.W.