The heroines of Jeanette Winterson's fiction have been fighting gravity for decades. With fantastical powers of weightlessness, walking on water and winging their way through cyberspace, their quest is to attain a bearable lightness of being. Moving in spirals rather than lines, her fiction reaches towards a timeless centre and she claims that her previous novel, The PowerBook, marked the end of a seven-novel cycle. With Lighthousekeeping, she has begun again.