Despite an incantatory repetition of phrases that threatens to break rather than cast a spell, ''The Passion'' is on the whole a deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so. The Passion is a fairy tale about survival and broken-heartedness, cruelty, obsession and madness. Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of ten novels, including Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, The Passion and Written On The Body a book of short stories. Her theme is passion - religious, heroic and erotic -but her writing, for all its inventiveness, is thrifty, controlled and precise. They pass easily from reality to miracle, as though the normally tough (if translucent) membrane between the natural and supernatural worlds were but a thin, discontinuous and shifting veil. Winterson's characters are as vivid and haunting as figures in a dream. Villanelle, bisexual and far from honest, deftly leads us through the mazy moral and emotional ambiguities of Venice's decadent gambling casinos.

Two first-person narratives alternate: Henri, reflective and observant, brings the reader from the quiet French farm of his youth into Napoleon's camps in France, eastern Europe and finally Russia. Its concentrated, beautifully detailed prose recalls the diction of fairy tales its plot incorporates their magic, their shrewd wit and brutality.

Winterson's second novel (after ''Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,'' which won England's Whitbread Prize). The New York Timesbestselling author interweaves the destinies of Napoleons cook and. (Atlantic Monthly, $16.95.) ''It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock.'' So Jeanette Winterson begins her tale of Henri, who slaughters and serves those chickens, and Villanelle, the sophisticated Venetian whose fate ultimately overtakes the simple soldier's. Read The Passion by Jeanette Winterson available from Rakuten Kobo.