As far as I knew no missionary had yet visited them. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad. They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. My favorite was Number 16, The Buzule of Carpathian. On the front were all the countries and on the back a number chart that told you about Tribes and their Peculiarities. Usually we listened to the Light Programme, but on Sundays always the World Service, so that my mother could record the progress of our missionaries. Sunday was the Lord’s day, the most vigorous day of the whole week we had a radiogram at home with an imposing mahogany front and a fat Bakelite knob to twiddle for the stations. 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 no Wise Men because she didn’t believe there were any wise men, but we had sheep. I cannot recall a time when I did not know that I was special. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children it wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, more that she didn’t want to do it. I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World. Jeanette’s insistence on listening to 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. 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 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. Now required reading in contemporary literature, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a funny, poignant exploration of a young girl’s quirky adolescence. 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. When it first appeared, Jeanette Winterson’s extraordinary debut novel received unanimous international praise, including the prestigious Whitbread Prize for best first fiction.

Jeanette winterson oranges