ORANGES AREN'T THE ONLY FRUIT by Jeanette Winterson

4 out of 5

• Pub. Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
• Sold By: Barnes & Noble
• Format: NOOK Book (eBook) , 192pp

Synopsis:

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.

Raised by an oppressively evangelical mother, Jeanette grows up a good little Christian soldier, even going so far as to stitch samplers whose apocalyptic themes terrify her classmates. As she dryly notes, without self-pity or smugness, ``This tendency towards the exotic has brought me many problems, just as it did for William Blake.'' Jeanette would have remained in the fold but for her unconventional desires; though she can reconcile her love of women with her love of God, the church cannot. It could have been a grim tale, but this first novelwinner of England's Whitbread Prizeis in fact a wry and tender telling of a young girl's triumphantly coming into her own.

Author:

A novelist whose honours include England’s Whitbread Prize, and the American Academy’s E. M. Forster Award, as well as the Prix d’argent at the Cannes Film Festival, Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene as a very young woman in 1985 with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Her subsequent novels, including Sexing the Cherry, The Passion,Written on the Body, and The PowerBook, have also gone on to receive great international acclaim. Her latest novel isLighthousekeeping, heralded as "a brilliant, glittering, piece of work". She lives in London and the Cotswolds.