Written on the Body
A love story told by a narrator with no name and no specified gender, a formal choice that makes the love feel universal rather than particular. Winterson writes about the body of the beloved with the reverence of a love letter and the precision of a medical text, often in the same sentence. Beautiful and formally radical.
Louise never gets to exist; the nameless narrator monologues over her so completely that she becomes an anatomy lesson, a cathedral, a prize, anything but a person with lines. When the narrator leaves her for her own good after the leukemia diagnosis, the book treats paternalism as tragedy. Winterson's sentences are gorgeous singly and accumulate into a quotation calendar.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
