Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
  • Published: 18 January 2022
  • ISBN: 9781784877484
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Formats & editions
Paperback
29 Oct 2024
Paperback
18 Jan 2022
Paperback
1 Nov 2014
Hardback
29 Apr 2025
EBook
1 Sep 2010
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Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world

'At that time I could not imagine what would become of me, and I didn't care. It was not judgement day, but another morning'

This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by working-class evangelists in the North of England to be one of God's elect. Passionate, headstrong and shielded by her mother's grand disapproval of a sinful world, she seems destined for life as a missionary. And then she meets Melanie.

At sixteen, Jeanette faces a world of uncertainty as she breaks from the church and her community for the young woman she loves. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a warm, witty and daring novel that gives voice to irrepressible desire.

Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world.
  • Published: 18 January 2022
  • ISBN: 9781784877484
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out.

Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, as well as children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.

She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.

portrait photo of Jeanette Winterson

Also by Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Night Side of the River
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Hansel and Greta
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Praise for Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

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

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

Still extraordinary, still brilliant

Metro

A novel that deserves revisiting...Winterson maintains a balance of tone, a trueness of voice... It remains one of the finest things Winterson has written

Observer

It is very funny, with an Alan Bennett sort of humour, beautifully written, quirky and likely to cause much tuttutting in conservative quarters

Daily Mail

This lesbian coming of age story set in northern England doesn't seem to have aged a bit

The Independent

An instant classic

Rosemary Goring, Herald