The New York Timesbestselling author's Whitbread Prizewinning debut';Winterson has mastered both comedy and tragedy in this rich little novel' (The Washington Post Book World). When it first appeared, Jeanette Winterson's extraordinary debut novel received unanimous international praise, including the prestigious Whitbread Prize for best first fiction. Winterson went on to fulfill that promise, producing some of the most dazzling fiction and nonfiction of the past decade, including her celebrated memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?. Now required reading in contemporary literature, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a funny, poignant exploration of a young girl's adolescence. Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette's insistence on listening to truths of her own heart and mindand on reporting them with wit and passionmakes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood. ';If Flannery O'Connor and Rita Mae Brown had collaborated on the coming-out story of a young British girl in the 1960s, maybe they would have approached the quirky and subtle hilarity of Jeanette Winterson's autobiographical first novel.... Winterson's voice, with its idiosyncratic wit and sensitivity, is one you've never heard before.' Ms. Magazine
'Many consider her to be the best living writer in this language... In her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' - Evening Standard
'Even at a time when so many good and interesting novels are coming out, hers stand out as performances of real originality and extraordinary promise' - John Bayley
'wonderful rites-of-passage novel… where the author’s blossoming Sapphic nature leads her to eschew her mothers proffered favourite' - Mariella Frostrup
Author
About Jeanette Winterson
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.
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