Jeanette Winterson Books In Order

Novels

  1. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
  2. The Passion (1987)
  3. Sexing the Cherry (1989)
  4. Written on the Body (1992)
  5. Art and Lies (1994)
  6. Gut Symmetries (1997)
  7. The Powerbook (2000)
  8. Lighthousekeeping (2004)
  9. Tanglewreck (2006)
  10. The Stone Gods (2007)
  11. The Battle of the Sun (2009)
  12. The Daylight Gate (2012)
  13. Frankissstein (2019)

Omnibus

  1. Vintage Monsters (2007)

Collections

  1. The World and Other Places (1998)
  2. The Brighton Book (2005)
  3. Ox-Tales: Fire (2009)
  4. Christmas Days (2016)
  5. Eight Ghosts (2017)

Chapbooks

  1. The King of Capri (2003)

Picture Books

  1. The Lion, The Unicorn and Me (2009)
  2. Hansel and Greta (2020)

Novellas

  1. Love (2017)

Anthologies edited

  1. Midsummer Nights (2009)

Non fiction

  1. Art Objects (1995)
  2. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011)
  3. Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (2011)
  4. Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere (2018)
  5. 12 Bytes (2021)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

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Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Jeanette Winterson Books Overview

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God fearing household crumbles.

The Passion

Jeanette Winterson’s novels have established her as one of the most important young writers in world literature. The Passion is perhaps her most highly acclaimed work, a modern classic that confirms her special claim on the novel. Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red haired, web footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meet their singular destiny. In her unique and mesmerizing voice, Winterson blends reality with fantasy, dream, and imagination to weave a hypnotic tale with stunning effects.

Sexing the Cherry

In a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth century England, a baby is found floating in the Thames. The child, Jordan, is rescued by Dog Woman and grows up to travel the world like Gulliver, though he finds that the world’s most curious oddities come from his own mind. Winterson leads the reader from discussions on the nature of time to Jordan s fascination with journeys concealed within other journeys, all with a dizzying speed that shoots the reader from epiphany to shimmering epiphany.

Written on the Body

The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. ‘At once a love story and a philosophical meditation.’ New York Times Book Review.

Art and Lies

One of the most audacious and provocative writers on either side of the Atlantic now gives readers a dazzling, arousing, and wise improvisation on art, Eros, language, and identity. ‘A series of intense, artful musings that are exhilarating and visionary…
. Unsettling yet strangely satisfying.’ Newsday.

Gut Symmetries

The highwire artist of the English novel redraws the romantic triangle for the post Einsteinian universe, where gender is as elastic as matter, and any accurate Grand Unified Theory GUT must encompass desire alongside electromagnetism and gravity. One starry night on a boat in the mid Atlantic, Alice, a brilliant English theoretical physicist, begins an affair with Jove, her remorselessly seductive American counterpart. But Jove is married. When Alice confronts his wife, Stella, she swiftly falls in love with her, with consequences that are by turns horrifying, comic, and arousing. Vaulting from Liverpool to New York, from alchemy to string theory, and from the spirit to the flesh, Gut Symmetries is a thrillingly original novel by England’s most flamboyantly gifted young writer.’Winterson is unmatched among contemporary writers in her ability to conjure up new world wonder…
A beautiful, stirring and brilliant story.’ Times Literary Supplement’Dazzling for its intelligence and inventiveness…
Winterson is possessed of a masterly command of the language and a truly pliant imagination.’ Elle’One of our most brilliant, visionary storytellers.’ San Francisco Chronicle

The Powerbook

To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run. ‘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. Ali discovers that she too will have to pay it. Death can take the body but not the heart. Set in London, Paris, Capri and Cyberspace, this is a book that reinvents itself as it travels. Using cover versions, fairy tales, contemporary myths and popular culture, ‘The Powerbook‘ works at the intersection between the real and the imagined. Its territory is you.

Lighthousekeeping

‘A child born of chance might imagine that Chance was its father, in the way that gods fathered children, and then abandoned them, without a backward glance, but with one small gift. I wondered if a gift had been left for me. I had no idea where to look, or what I was looking for, but I know now that all important journeys start that way. ‘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 ties that bind and 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. Caught in her own particular darknesses, she embarks on an Ulyssean sift through the stories we tell ourselves, stories of love and loss, of passion and longing, stories of unending journeys that move through places and times, and the bleak finality of the shores of betrayal. But finally, ‘I love you. The most difficult words in the world. But what else can I say?’ A story of mutability, of talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us.

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.

The Stone Gods

This new world weighs a yatto-gram.

But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me-tiny or blurred-out-offocus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there are long-toed claw prints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish…

Mankind has rendered its planet unlivable and is beginning to colonize a new blue planet. Our hero*ine Billie Crusoe’s flight to the future is also a return to the distant past-‘Everything is imprinted forever with what once was.’ What begins as a witty, satirical futurist adventure deepens into a dazzling exploration of our relationship to environment, to power and technology, and to what defines us as humans.

For over twenty years Jeanette Winterson has consistently been one of our most brilliant writers. Lyrical, visionary, by turns funny and devastating, The Stone Gods is fiction at its most provocative. 20080124

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.

Vintage Monsters

Vintage Monsters‘ is a limited edition gift pack which consists of beautifully designed separate volumes of ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley and Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Sexing the Cherry.’ ‘Vintage Monsters‘ is just one of ten ‘Vintage Classic Twins’ to collect. Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought provoking combination. ‘Frankenstein:, One freezing morning, a lone man wandering across the artic ice caps is rescued from starvation by a ship’s captain. Victor Frankenstein’s story is one of ambition, murder and revenge. As a young scientist he pushed moral boundaries in order to cross the final scientific frontier and create life. But his creation is a monster stitched together from grave robbed body parts who has no place in the world, and his life can only lead to tragedy. ‘Sexing the Cherry’: ‘Sexing the Cherry’ follows the adventures of Jordan, an explorer, and his mother, the gigantic and violent ‘Dog Woman’. Jeanette Winterson’s stunning novel celebrates the power of the imagination as it juggles with our perception of history and reality; love and sex; lies and truths; and 12 dancing princesses who lived happily ever after, but not with their husbands.

The World and Other Places

With language as dazzling as the wondrous visionary landscapes they evoke, these seventeen works transport the reader to worlds in which sleep is illegal, the lives of lonely department store clerks are transformed by fairies, the rich wear coal jewelry on an island of diamonds, and the living laminate their dead. Here is a universe where rooms go missing, women give birth to their lovers, and the young contemplate God’s creative powers through pet tortoises.

The King of Capri

The King of Capri is so greedy that he wishes he had two mouths with which to feed himself. Meanwhile, across the bay in the city of Naples, the washerwoman Mrs. Jewel barely manages to feed herself and her very skinny cat. But one night a great wind blows in and carries everything away from the King’s castle, towards Naples, and into Mrs. Jewel’s yard. The King is left alone and forlorn as everyone leaves Capri to visit the generous Mrs. Jewel, who has become the Queen of Naples. When he goes to make this new queen’s acquaintance, The King of Capri and the Queen of Naples fall in love and they have nothing left to wish for.

The Lion, The Unicorn and Me

In Jeanette Winterson’s beautifully evocative retelling of the story of the very first Christmas, the humble donkey is chosen amongst all the other animals, including the kingly lion and the proud unicorn. As his journey unfolds, he is touched by the magic and mystery of the Nativity. Stunning illustrations by Rosalind Macurrach and twinkling gold detail make this the perfect Christmas book.

Midsummer Nights

An anthology of opera-inspired stories by some of the most acclaimed writers of modern fiction includes new work by Kate Atkinson, Alexander McCall Smith, Ruth Rendell, Anne Enright, and many more Jeanette Winterson’s request of many of her best-loved contemporaries was that they ‘choose an opera, and from its music or its characters, its plot or its libretto, or even a mood evoked, write a story.’ This specially commissioned collection of comedies, tragedies, and tales of love won or lost is contemporary fiction at its very finest, a book as broad in content as it is deep in atmosphere. The characters are from all walks of life, all parts of the world, and are driven by all motivations. All the stories are rich with emotion and written to inspire. Written for lovers of fiction and opera alike, this anthology includes notes explaining on which opera each story is based, with a brief synopsis and a history of where and when it was first performed. The inside front and back covers feature brand new opera-themed illustrations from Posy Simmonds, the cartoonist whose work includes Gemma Bovary and Tamara Drewe.

Art Objects

In ten interconnected essays, the author of Art & Lies explores the active role of art in the modern world, offering writings on painting, modernism, autobiography, style, the future of fiction, Virginia Woolf, and her own relationship to her work.NYT.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson’s novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most admired books of the past few decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is now often required reading in contemporary fiction. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?? is a memoir about a life s work to find happiness. It’s a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the Universe as Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past that Jeanette thought she’d written over and repainted rose to haunt her, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?? is a tough minded search for belonging for love, identity, home, and a mother.

Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!

In Vintage’s 21st anniversary year, this book is a mission statement about the paramount importance of reading to our quality of life. In any 24 hours there might be sleeping, eating, kids, parents, friends, lovers, work, school, travel, deadlines, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, the news, the TV, Playstation, music, movies, sport, responsibilities, passions, desires, dreams. Why should you stop what you’re doing and read a book? But people have always needed stories. We need literature novels, poetry because we need to make sense of our lives, test our depths, understand our joys, and discover what humans are capable of. Great books can provide companionship when we are lonely or peacefulness in the midst of the commuter rush. Reading provides a unique kind of pleasure and no one should live without it. The ten essays in this book tell us about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken forgranted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on your time and attention make books one of them.

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