Product Description

This title, the winner of the 1985 Whitbread Award for a First Novel, chronicles the struggles of a young girl against a domineering mother and the strictures of religion. The novel takes a look at religious excess and human obsession.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #995 in Books
• Published on: 1991-09-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 171 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Jeanette, the protagonist of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the author's namesake, has issues--"unnatural" ones: her adopted mam thinks she's the Chosen one from God; she's beginning to fancy girls; and an orange demon keeps popping into her psyche. Already Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical first novel is not your typical coming-of-age tale.

Brought up in a working-class Pentecostal family, up North, Jeanette follows the path her Mam has set for her. This involves Bible quizzes, a stint as a tambourine-playing Sally Army officer and a future as a missionary in Africa, or some other "heathen state". When Jeanette starts going to school ("The Breeding Ground") and confides in her mother about her feelings for another girl ("Unnatural Passions"), she's swept up in a feverish frenzy for her tainted soul. Confused, angry and alone, Jeanette strikes out on her own path, that involves a funeral parlour and an ice-cream van. Mixed in with the so-called reality of Jeanette's existence growing up are unconventional fairy tales that transcend the everyday world, subverting the traditional preconceptions of the damsel in distress.

In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson knits a complicated picture of teenage angst through a series of layered narratives, incorporating and subverting fairytales and myths, to present a coherent whole, within which her stories can stand independently. Imaginative and mischievous, she is a born storyteller, teasing and taunting the reader to reconsider their worldview. --Nicola Perry

Review
"An explosively imaginative writer." -"The London Free Press"
"She is a master of her material, a writer [of] great talent." -"Muriel Spark"
"Many consider her to be the best living writer in this language." -"Evening Standard"
"The overwhelming impression of her work is one of remarkable self-confidence, and she evidently thrives on risk.... As good as Poe: it dares you to laugh and stares you down." -"The New York Review of Books"
"The most interesting writer I have read in twenty years." -Gore Vidal

About the Author
Jeanette Winterson is the author of many novels including Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, Art and Lies, Gut Symmetries, The World and Other Places, The Powerbook and a collection of essays, Art Objects.

Customer Reviews

orgasmic poetry
'One of my earliest memories is me sitting on a sheep at Easter while she told me the story of the Sacrificial Lamb. We had it on Sundays with potato'.

This is just one of the many brilliantly quirky remarks of Jeanette that sparkle throughout Oranges. What so stands her apart from other modern writers in this novel is her signature frank style of writing - a refreshingly clean and matter-of-fact narrative, yet so flawlessly precise and so perfectly encapsulating of the emotions behind different experiences in life. Jeanette's idiosyncratic writing is one where every sentence shines with unadulterated beauty and raw poetic force. Her rare sensitivity and affinity with words and language itself is more than amazing - it is magical.

Oranges is more than Jeanette's autobiography weaven amidst fairytale myths and parables. It is more than a story about the struggle between religion and sexuality. It is the the story of all of us, it is our story. The betrayal of parental figures, the driving force of budding sexuality, the mixture of indifference and indignance towards an ex-lover, the innate loyalty to family deep within, all these are passages of life we all walk through, yet how often is it so penetratingly and unforgettably recorded in a chronicle that will be read again and again for many generations to come. Jeanette is the voice of a generation crying out for independence and the need to be true to our hearts; she is the hidden voice of all of us.

That perhaps is what really makes Oranges so special and personal, that behind Jeanette's dazzling prose we hear our story, our voice.

Passionate and gritty, a coming of age novel with a difference
A curious mixture of stories and semi-autobiography which come together to shape the life of Jeanette, the adopted daughter of a church-obsessed mother and a quiet, dominated father. Oranges are not the Fruit traces Jeanette teenage years, growing up in a northern town in a community in which she never quite fits, despite her talent for preaching and her wildly imaginative ideas. The structure of the novel, skirting and spiralling between an disjointed biographical narrative and other stories which shape Jeanette's development, suits perfectly what is a gritty discourse on the nature of personality, history and memory and the importance of perspective in developing all three. And at the same time, it's an engaging, if sometimes distressing, story too.

This book will stretch your mind
Jeanette Winterson has written a powerful novel which will challenge the reader on many different levels. Its treatment of the lifestory to young adulthood of a non-conformist woman is so real you can touch the emotion. The layering of one story on another demonstrates Miss Winterson's marvellous technique as a novelist, whilst the way she weaves the Pentateuch into her plot will send you racing to check the original! A great read and well worth a deeper look.