One Aladdin Two Lamps

Jeanette Winterson

$39.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Jonathan Cape Ltd
13 November 2025

Literary essays

I can change the story because I am the story- a celebration of the power of storytelling, a guide to starting your life as a reader, and a delightful recounting of the Arabian Nights, in the new book from Jeanette Winterson

I can change the story because I am the story.

With her execution looming, a woman is fighting 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 reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. 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 and 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 realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as a fact.

Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future - an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.

By: Jeanette Winterson
Imprint: Jonathan Cape Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 222mm, Width: 138mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 400g
ISBN: 9781787336124
ISBN 10: 1787336123
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 13 November 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She 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 two previous collections of short stories, 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.