Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

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.