One of my favourite things about Jeanette Winterson’s novels is how delightfully weird they can be. Take this bit from The Passion, about a former heiress who lives in the mossy crevice of a back canal in Venice. “I cannot tell how old she may be, her hair is green with slime from the walls of the nook she lives in. She feeds on vegetable matter that snags against the stones when the tide is sluggish. She has no teeth. She has no need of teeth. She still wears the curtains that she dragged from her drawing-room window as she left … I saw her once, at evening, her ghoulish hair lit by a lamp she has. She was spreading pieces of rancid meat