About the Author
Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of ten novels, including Oranges are not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry; a book of short stories, The World and Other Places; a collection of essays, Art Objects as well as many other works, including children's books, screenplays and journalism. Her writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Prix d'argent at Cannes Film Festival.
Featured books by Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days
There are ghosts here and jovial spirits. Chances at love and tricks with time. There is frost and icicles, mistletoe and sledges. There's a cat and a dog and a solid silver frog. There's a Christmas cracker with a surprising gift inside. There's a haunted house and a SnowMama. There are Yuletides and holly wreaths. Three Kings. And a merry little Christmas time. And for the icing on the Christmas cake, there are twelve festive recipes from Yuletides past and present. Red cabbage, gravlax, turkey biryani, sherry trifle, Mrs Winterson's mince pies and more.
The Gap of Time The Winter's Tale Retold
A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from - but she's about to find out.
The Gap of Time The Winter's Tale Retold
'I saw the strangest sight tonight.' New Bohemia. America. A storm. A black man finds a white baby abandoned in the night. He gathers her up - light as a star - and decides to take her home. London. England. After the financial crash. Leo Kaiser knows how to make money but he doesn't know how to manage the jealousy he feels towards his best friend and his wife. Is the newborn baby even his? New Bohemia. 17 years later. A boy and a girl are falling in love but there's a lot they don't know about who they are and where they come from.
Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?
A 2013 World Book Night selection. Shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards 'UK Author of the Year' 2012. A companion to Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, allowing Jeanette Winterson to explore the truth (often far worse than the fictionalised version) behind her autobiographical novel. The power of the written word to a child is brilliantly captured, books allowing the author to escape and find her own life – to write her own words.Like for Like ReadingBad Blood, Lorna SageOnce in a House on Fire, Andrea Ashworth
Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 15 December 2011. Jeanette Winterson: In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , was published. It tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster. Written when Jeanette was only twenty-five, her novel went on to win the Whitbread First Novel award, become an international bestseller and inspire an award-winning BBC television adaptation. Oranges was semi-autobiographical. Mrs Winterson, a thwarted giantess, loomed over that novel and its author's life. When Jeanette finally left her home, at sixteen, because she was in love with a woman, Mrs Winterson asked her: why be happy when you could be normal? This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a tyrant in place of a mother, who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster drawer, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an northern industrial town now changed beyond recognition, part of a community now vanished; and, about the Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later life, and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking.
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
‘She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent abides’ Vanity Fair
Other books by Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days
A Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year `Winterson's winter tales unfailingly succeed in their endeavor to leave you aglow' - Guardian For years Jeanette Winterson has written a new story at Christmas time and here she brings together twelve of her brilliantly imaginative, funny, and bold tales, along with twelve delicious recipes for the twelve days of Christmas.
Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere
Behind every great woman is a man who tried to stop her. A century on from the first votes for women in the UK, award-winning author Jeanette Winterson asks what we still stand to learn from the Suffragettes. Examining recent women's rights movements, the worlds of politics and technology, social media and changes in the law, Winterson celebrates how far we have come, but demands that we do more. There is still so far to go, so much courage we still need to find. Witty and wise, incisive and inspiring, Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere is a powerful reminder of the need for true equality, and an urgent call to arms.
Weight
Condemned to shoulder the world forever by the gods he dared defy, freedom seems unattainable to Atlas. But then he receives an unexpected visit from Heracles, the one man strong enough to share the burden . . . Jeanette Winterson's retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles asks difficult and eternal questions about the nature of choice and coercion. Visionary and inventive, Weight turns the familiar on its head to show us ourselves in a new light.
Love Vintage Minis
How do we love? With romance. With work. Through heartbreak. Throughout a lifetime. As a means, but not an end. Love in all its forms has been an abiding theme of Jeanette Winterson's writing. Here are selections from her books about that impossible, essential force, stories and truths that search for the mythical creature we call Love. Selected from the books of Jeanette Winterson VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis series: Eating by Nigella Lawson Jealousy by Marcel Proust Babies by Anne Enright Desire by Haruki Murakami
Christmas Days
For years Jeanette Winterson has loved writing a new story at Christmastime, and here she brings together twelve of her brilliantly imaginative, funny, and bold tales. For the Twelve Days of Christmas-a time of celebration, sharing, and giving-she offers these twelve plus one: a personal story of her own Christmas memories.These tales open a portal into the spirit of the season, when time slows down and magic starts to happen. From trees with mysterious powers to a tinsel baby that talks, philosophical fairies to flying dogs, a haunted house to a disappearing train, Winterson's innovative stories encompass the childlike and spooky wonder of Christmas, perfect for listening to by the fire with loved ones or while traveling home for the holidays.Enjoy the season of peace and goodwill, mystery, and a little bit of magic courtesy of one of our most fearless and accomplished writers.
Christmas Days 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days
There are ghosts here and jovial spirits. Chances at love and tricks with time. There is frost and icicles, mistletoe and sledges. There's a cat and a dog and a solid silver frog. There's a Christmas cracker with a surprising gift inside. There's a haunted house and a SnowMama. There are Yuletides and holly wreaths. Three Kings. And a merry little Christmas time. And for the icing on the Christmas cake, there are twelve festive recipes from Yuletides past and present. Red cabbage, gravlax, turkey biryani, sherry trifle, Mrs Winterson's mince pies and more.
The Gap of Time The Winter's Tale Retold
A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from - but she's about to find out.
Gap of Time
The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's ';late plays.' It tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited. In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson's cover version of The Winter's Tale, we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology and the elliptical nature of time. Written with energy and wit, this is a story of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other.From the Hardcover edition.
Written On The Body
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.
Sexing The Cherry
Sexing the Cherry celebrates the power of the imagination as it playfully juggles with our perception of history and reality. It is a story about love and sex; lies and truths; and twelve dancing princesses who lived happily ever after, but not with their husbands. With a new introduction by the author 'A book of innocence and bawdiness, fury and joy...needs to be read and re-read' The Times 'Read it and marvel. Jeanette Winterson's voice is startlingly original, and her imaginative feats are utterly dazzling' Cosmopolitan 'Her stories and characters levitate off the page into dancing life... A bold, bizarre and timely book' Independent 'Simple prose shows the subtlest of minds behind it, swift, confident and dazzling' Financial Times
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession. With a new introduction by the author 'Witty, bizarre, extraordinary and exhilarating' The Times 'She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent abides' Vanity Fair 'Many consider her to be the best living writer in this language... In her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' Evening Standard 'A novel that deserves revisiting' Observer 'A wonderful rites-of-passage novel' Mariella Frostrup
The Powerbook
The PowerBook is twenty-first century fiction that uses past, present and future as shifting dimensions of a multiple reality. The story is simple. An e-writer called Ali or Alix will write to order anything you like, provided that you are prepared to enter the story as yourself and take the risk of leaving it as someone else. You can be the hero of your own life. You can have freedom just for one night. But there is a price to pay.
The Passion
Henri had a passion for Napoleon and Napoleon had a passion for chicken. From Boulogne to Moscow Henri butchered for his Emperor and never killed a single man. Meanwhile, in Venice, the city of chance and disguises, Villanelle was born with the webbed feet of her boatman father - but in the casinos she gambled her heart and lost. As the soldier-chef's love for Napoleon turns to hate he finds the Venetian beauty, and together they flee to the canals of darkness. 'It's a fantasy, a vivid dream... inventive and brilliant' Guardian 'As moving and funny as it is skilful, and reflects the author's formidable appetite for life' Sunday Times 'A book of great imaginative audacity and assurance...brilliantly physical (and funny) detail Times Literary Supplement 'Its concentrated, beautifully detailed prose recalls the diction of fairy tales; its plot incorporates their magic, their shrewd wit and brutality...a deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so' New York Times
Art & Lies A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd
'There is no such thing as autobiography, there is only art and lies'. Set in a London of the near future, its three principal characters, Handel, Picasso and Sappho, separately flee the city and find themselves on the same train, drawn to one another through the curious agency of a book. Stories within stories take us through the unlikely love-affairs of one Doll Sneerpiece, an 18th century bawd, and into the world of painful beauty where language has the power to heal. Art & Lies is a question and a quest: How shall I live?
Gut Symmetries
Travelling across the Atlantic on board the QE2, Alice - a bright, young physicist - meets Jove, short for Giovanni, one of the world's most respected experts on time travel and a confirmed lothario. By the time the pair land in New York, Alice has become Jove's mistress, an affair of the heart which is only complicated further when Alice meets Jove's, wife, Stella; a tempestuous beauty born with a diamond at the base of her spine. As this love triangle turns into a menage-a-trois, Alice, Stella and Jove struggle against the currents immersing them, while their romance pulls into its wake the stories of other generations, philosophies, quantum physics and time travel. A celebration of the human heart in all its frailty, confusion and excess, Gut Symmetries is a lyrical evocation of parallel lives, loves and universes, from one of Britain's best loved authors.
The Daylight Gate
Good Friday 1612. Pendle Hill. A mysterious gathering of thirteen people is interrupted by a local magistrate. Is it a witches' Sabbat? In Lancaster Castle two notorious witches await trial and certain death, while the beautiful and wealthy Alice Nutter rides to their defence. Elsewhere a starved child lurks. And a Jesuit priest and former Gunpowder plotter makes his way from France to a place he believes will offer him sanctuary. But will it? And how safe can anyone be in Witch Country?
Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?
A 2013 World Book Night selection. Shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards 'UK Author of the Year' 2012. A companion to Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, allowing Jeanette Winterson to explore the truth (often far worse than the fictionalised version) behind her autobiographical novel. The power of the written word to a child is brilliantly captured, books allowing the author to escape and find her own life – to write her own words.Like for Like ReadingBad Blood, Lorna SageOnce in a House on Fire, Andrea Ashworth
The Battle of the Sun
Jack is the chosen one, the Radiant Boy the Magus needs in order to perfect the alchemy that will transform London of the 1660s into a golden city. But Jack isn't the kind of boy who will do what he is told by an evil genius, and he is soon involved in an epic and nail-biting adventure featuring dragons, knights and Queen Elizabeth I, as he battles to save London.
The Stone Gods
The Stone Gods is one of Jeanette Winterson's most imaginative novels -- an interplanetary love story; a traveller's tale; a hymn to the beauty of the world On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet - pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What will happen when their story combines with the world's story, as they whirl towards Planet Blue, into the future? Will they - and we - ever find a safe landing place?
Tanglewreck
A little way in the future, time is distorting. Time Tornadoes are causing havoc. People are whirled out of their own time, never to return, and a Woolly Mammoth has been seen on the banks of the River Thames. But time is big business, and whoever gets control of time controls life as we know it! In a house called Tanglewreck lives a girl called Silver and her aunt Mrs Rokabye. Unbeknown to Silver there is a family treasure in the form of a 17th-century watch called the Timekeeper, and this treasure holds the key to the mysterious and frightening changes in time. When the sinister Abel Drinkwater arrives at Tanglewreck in search of the watch, Silver realises she must embark on a journey through Time and Space to find the Timekeeper.
Weight
Condemned to shoulder the world for ever by the gods he dared defy, freedom seems unattainable to Atlas. But then he receives an unexpected visit from Heracles, the one man strong enough to share the burden, and it seems they can strike a bargain that might release him ... Jeanette Winterson asks difficult questions about the nature of choice and coercion in her dazzling retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles. Visionary and inventive, believable and intimate, Weight turns the familiar on its head to show us ourselves in a new light.
Tanglewreck
In a house called Tanglewreck lives a girl called Silver and her guardian Mrs Rokabye. Unbeknown to Silver there is a family treasure in the form of a seventeenth-century watch called the Timekeeper, and this treasure holds the key to the mysterious and frightening changes in time. When Silver goes on the run to try and protect herself and the Timekeeper, a remarkable and compelling adventure unfolds full of brilliance and wit, as is befitting an author with the imagination and style of Jeanette Winterson.
Tanglewreck
In a house called Tanglewreck lives a girl called Silver and her guardian Mrs Rockerbye. Unbeknown to Silver there is a family treasure in the form of a seventeenth century watch called The Timekeeper and this treasure holds the key to the mysterious and frightening changes in time. When Silver goes on the run to try and protect herself and The Timekeeper a remarkable and compelling adventure unfolds full of brilliance and wit, as is befitting an author with the imagination and style of Jeanette Winterson.
Lighthousekeeping
From one of Britain's best-loved literary novelists comes a magical, lyrical tale of the young orphan Silver, taken in by the ancient lighthousekeeper Mr. Pew, who reveals to her a world of myth and mystery through the art of storytelling. Motherless and anchorless, Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of the slippages that occur throughout every life. One life, Babel Dark's, a nineteenth-century clergyman, opens like a map that Silver must follow, and the intertwining of myth and reality, of storytelling and experience, lead her through her own particular darkness. A story of mutability, talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, Lighthousekeeping is a way into the most secret recesses of our own hearts and minds. Jeanette Winterson is one of the most extraordinary and original writers of her generation, and this shows her at her lyrical best.
The World And Other Places
In this, her first collection of short stories, Winterson reveals all the facets of her extraordinary imagination. In prose that is full of imagery and word-play, she creates physical and psychological worlds that are at once familiar and yet shockingly strange.
Art Objects Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
These interlocking essays uncover art as an active force in the world - neither elitist or remote, present to those who want it, affecting even those who don't. Winterson's own passionate vision of art is presented here, provocatively and personally, in pieces on Modernism, autobiography, style, painting, the future of fiction, in two essays on Virginia Woolf, and more intimately in pieces where she describes her relationship to her work and the books that she loves.