The book is set in a dystopian United States where civil war has broken out between different political, racial and gendered groups.

A dark satire, the book parodies primitive notions of gender, sexual difference and identity from a post-feminist perspective.

[1] Carter began work on The Passion of New Eve in January 1972, inspired in part by the Greek myth of Tiresias, who was turned into a woman as a punishment from the goddess Hera.

His tribute to Tristessa de St Ange, a (fictional) American silent movie star, on his last night in England is to be given fellatio by a girl he takes to see one of her films.

He arrives in a dystopian New York, a city in its last stages of rotting death, overrun by huge rats and human emotions distilled to their most primeval.

She operates on Evelyn, removing his genitals and implants a fully functioning vagina and ovaries, as well as giving him breast augmentation surgery.

Eve escapes but is captured, raped, and enslaved by Zero, a cruel male cult leader and "poet" with only one eye and one leg.

Lilith takes Eve to the coast to meet with Mother again, here they see a crazy old lady on a beach—a manifestation of ageing superficiality: dirty, caked in make-up, with piled high golden locks, singing old musical songs and living on vodka and cold tinned food and defecating in the bushes behind her deck chair.

The amber Eve discovers in one of the caves and holds in her hands liquifies into ancient pine forests and primeval species.

Eve swaps the gold alchemical on a neck chain that Lilith has given her for the purple skiff belonging to the crazed old woman and takes the boat and sails away.