One Aladdin Two Lamps

“Enchanting, unexpected and razor-sharp. Jeanette Winterson and Shahrazad are the perfect co-pilots to take us into new worlds on the wings of old stories.”—Kamila Shamsie, award-winning author of Home Fire

I can change the story because I am the story.

“One of the most daring and inventive writers of our time” (Elle) weaves together memoir, manifesto, and a feminist reimagining of One Thousand and One Nights in this impassioned exploration of the power of reading

A woman is filibustering for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to explore new and ancient questions. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy?

In her guise as Aladdin—the orphan who changes his world—Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know. To look again. Especially to look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realizes through the power of books that she can read herself as fiction as well as a fact: “I can change the story because I am the story.”

An alluring blend of the ancient and the contemporary, One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson’s newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future—an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew.

Author Biography

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She is a beloved cultural icon and queer trailblazer who published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and three collections of short stories, as well as children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays. Her novel Written on the Body was named one of the 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature by the New York Times. Since her innovative and forward-thinking writing about AI in her essay collection 12 Bytes, she speaks at tech conferences around the world. She is professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester and writes a popular Substack, Mind Over Matter. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.