When a writer takes on the challenge of creating a work in the image of the Bard himself, she faces some mighty high hurdles. But the wonderfully talented Jeanette Winterson, OBE, who won the Whitbread Award for her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, more than rises to the occasion with this engrossing retelling of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. With The Gap of Time (Hogarth, $25), Winterson lets Shakespeare’s characters loose in the modern world and spins them into a tumble of events that leads to the sundering of a deep friendship and marriage, and splinters the lives of three families. But the tale also includes a lost-and-found child who is destined to reunite them all. Winterson’s novel inaugurates Hogarth Press’s new series of contemporary retellings of Shakespeare’s works, and if this volume is an indication of what’s to come, the project will be a great success. Winterson layers her story in tight, controlled prose and we follow each character with an unflagging urgency right to the end—when the various plotlines come together with a satisfying crash. The Gap of Time is simply a delight.