'A strikingly quirky, delicate, and intricate work... Winterson has mastered both comedy and tragedy in this rich little novel.... Winterson's great gift is evident.' - 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 has gone on to fulfill that promise, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and producing some of the most dazzling and admired novels of the past decade. Now required reading in contemporary literature, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a funny, poignant exploration of a young girl's quirky 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 the truths of her own heart and mind–and on reporting them with wit and passion–makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood.
'A daring, unconventional comic novel... by employing quirky anecdotes, which are told with romping humor, and by splicing various parables into the narrative, Winterson allows herself the dangerous luxury of writing a novel that refuses to rely on rousing plot devices... A fascinating debut... A penetrating novel.' - Chicago Tribune
'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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in England in 1959, Jeanette Winterson was raised by a family of Pentecostal evangelists and was destined to become a missionary. Instead, she left home for several odd jobs before studying English at Oxford. She then worked in the theater before writing Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. She is also the author of The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, Art and Lies, Art Objects, and Gut Symmetries.
