Photo of author Jeanette Winterson in the Penguin Podcast studio

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Interviews

The human experience and AI with Jeanette Winterson

The Penguin Podcast: episode 11 – winter reads with Jeanette Winterson

Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson

Night Side of the River Hero

Extracts

Extract: Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson

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Reading lists

The best books about AI

An illustration of a horror scale of spooky books, from 'ghost emoji' to 'skull and crossbones' emoji.

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The best horror stories told in novels, ranked from scary to terrifying

A black-and-white photograph of Jeanette Winterson's head and shoulders

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Jeanette Winterson on the books that changed her life

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Where to start reading Jeanette Winterson’s books

The 1980s was a decade of massive social, political and cultural change. 

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Books that shaped the 1980s

The best memoirs of all time including Michelle Obama's Becoming, Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, Chanel Miller's Know My Name and Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy.

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The best memoirs of all time, as chosen by our readers

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Features

Five ways to show your local library some love

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Summer fiction reading list from VINTAGE

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What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

7 books about the dark side of growing up

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7 coming-of-age books about the dark side of growing up

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From page to screen: gay love in cinema

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

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Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Characterised by Winterson’s bold and experimental style, this is a book with darkness and light about what it means to live your own truth

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.

A beautiful hardback edition of Jeanette Winterson's explosive first novel: a gripping coming-of-age story, a queer romance, a modern classic. 
 
‘I love her.’ 
‘Then you do not love the Lord.’ 
‘Yes, I love both of them.’ 
‘You cannot.’ 
'I do.'' 
 
This is the story of Jeanette, born to be one of God's elect: adopted by a fanatical Pentecostal family and ablaze with her own zeal for the scriptures, she seems perfectly suited for the life of a missionary. But then she converts Melanie, and realises she loves this woman almost as much as she loves the Lord. How on Earth could her Church called that passion Unnatural? 
 
Both a groundbreaking coming-of-age novel and a pioneering work of autofiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit goes beyond facts into the deepest truths. Searing and tender, playful and provocative, it is a portrait of the artist as a young evangelist, re-writing her own Bible. 
 
'Witty... extraordinary and exhilarating' The Times 
 
'She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent abides' Vanity Fair 
 
'Many consider her to be the best living writer in this language... In her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' Evening Standard 
 
Vintage Quarterbound Classics: Bound to be beautiful

Night Side of the River

The dazzling and genre-bending new collection of ghost stories from Sunday Times bestseller Jeanette Winterson 
 ‘Spine-chillingly good’ iNEWS 
 ‘Winterson the artist at her most potent’ GUARDIAN 
 Our lives are now digital, exposed and always-on. We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They’ve simply adapted and innovated. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect… 
 
 To live amongst us. 
 
 To remind us. 
 
 To tempt us. 
 
 To take their revenge. 
 
 These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead – of those we’ve lost, loved, forgotten…and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be. 
 ‘Engrossing… A must-read’ ELLE 
 ‘Playful and poignant’ OBSERVER 
 ‘Captivating and chilling’ DAILY EXPRESS

In the stories Winterson is at her best, unsurprisingly, when doing new things with the form

A thought-provoking collection of short stories, interspersed with memories of her own unexplained encounters with the paranormal&hellip; The theme that runs through all the stories is loss and how it haunts the living

Thought-provoking... A captivating and chilling collection examining grief, revenge and how technology can breach the boundary between life and death

Jeanette Winterson brings the classic gothic literature theme into the 21st century by imagining what happens when the undead have to find modern ways to reach out to us... This collection is as hair-raising and suspenseful as it is witty and thought-provoking

Winterson the artist at her most potent, melding the viscerally real with the lavishly supernatural

I loved Night Side of the River. Jeanette Winterson is one of the wittiest writers around today&hellip; I can't think of any other writer who can treat death and horror with such lightheartedness and pragmatic cheerfulness but without losing the cold-yet-cosy frisson that comes with all the best ghost stories. MR James would be very happy!

Natasha Pulley, author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

A collection of ghost stories that range from campfire-level spooks to speculative reflections on the meaning of life.. As challenging and entertaining as anything undertaken by this endlessly ingenious writer

At the height of spooky season, turn off the lights and immerse yourself in the spine-tingling delights of this frighteningly modern ghost story collection. Blurring the lines between nonfiction and campfire tale, this one imagines what would happen if there really was a ghost in the machine

This collection is as hair-raising and suspenseful as it is witty and thought-provoking

Winterson is so bright, original, playful, subversive, with a sly talent for making the flesh creep

In these enjoyable tales Winterson has ably served the genre, while also sketching some unsettling future directions the ghost story might take

Memorable&hellip; These supernatural tales are satisfyingly disconcerting

Winterson's collection of ghost stories is a spirited mix of the witty, playful and poignant

Our lives are now digital, exposed and always-on. We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They’ve simply adapted and innovated. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect… 
 
To live amongst us. 
 
To remind us. 
 
To tempt us. 
 
To take their revenge. 
 
These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead – of those we’ve lost, loved, forgotten…and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be.

How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love

12 Bytes

Briskly and breezily, it [12 Bytes] joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers

12 punchy, fact-laden and witty essays... Her writing engulfs you in lucid, fairytale-like realities that take you on gender-bending and time-warped explorations of religion, love, sex, and sexual identity.

An unusual and entertaining read...[12 Bytes] is inflected with the same delightful, dry humour as the rest of her work... With its imaginative, insightful and wide-ranging essays, 12 Bytes will undoubtedly prompt readers to begin their own circlings around AI.

Aspects of this AI future are frightening...[and] for any non-scientist wanting to understand the challenges and possibilities of this brave new world, I can't think of a more engaging place to start.

This is, among other things, a very funny book... we are hardly short of dystopias, fictional and otherwise. Winterson's approach is much richer and more fun: a kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories.

[Winterson's] essays...are agile, fascinating, richly varied and beautifully idiosyncratic.

Winterson... is always passionate and provocative.

Lively, frequently laugh-aloud funny...the 12 essays use a combination of history, literature, religion, science fiction and electronics to extend our mental horizons.

[Winterson] reflects on the history - and future - of technology in essays that whirr with anarchic intelligence

'Joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers' Observer 
 
How is artificial intelligence changing the way we live and love? Now with a new chapter, this is the eye-opening new book from Sunday Times bestselling author Jeanette Winterson. 
 
Drawing on her years of thinking and reading about AI, Jeanette Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, politics and, of course, computer science to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now. 
 
With wit, compassion and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI's most interesting talking points - from the weirdness of backing up your brain and the connections between humans and non-human helpers to whether it's time to leave planet Earth. 
 
'Very funny... A kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories' Spectator 
 
'Refreshingly optimistic' Guardian 
 
A 'Books of 2021' Pick in the Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard

Sexing the Cherry

The best of Jeanette Winterson's remarkable, radical and genre-expanding novels, reissued in a bold new look ahead of the publication of her new book, 12 BYTES

A book of innocence and bawdiness, fury and joy...needs to be read and re-read

Read it and marvel. Jeanette Winterson's voice is startlingly original, and her imaginative feats are utterly dazzling

Simple prose shows the subtlest of minds behind it, swift, confident and dazzling

Winterson juggles past and present, fantasy and reality, to produce an original and entertaining novel which invites us to re-examine our own perceptions of time

Her stories and characters levitate off the page into dancing life... A bold, bizarre and timely book

Her strangest and most challenging fiction

It runs on the fuel of imagination...highly entertaining...an exploration of the elasticity of time and reality

'A book of innocence and bawdiness, fury and joy...needs to be read and re-read' The Times 
 
 
On the banks of the Thames a baby is found floating. Rescued by the Dog-Woman, a giant strong enough to fling an elephant into the air, their lives together will take them on a dizzying journey through space and time. 
 
As past and present collapse and centuries overlap, love, sex, truth, lies and twelve dancing princesses take centre stage. 
 
 
 'Entrancing...fabulous... Its language retains the clear music of poetry' Sunday Telegraph 
 
 'Simple prose shows the subtlest of minds behind it, swift, confident and dazzling' Financial Times 
 
 'Her stories and characters levitate off the page into dancing life... A bold, bizarre and timely book' Independent

Written on the Body

Part love story, part philosophical treatise, part anatomical guide, Written on the Body defies categorisation, dispensing with clichés and stereotypes to forge, from the raw physicality of the body itself, a new language for love.

Winterson's novels are about exploding our complacent notions of the real, breaking down received ideas of gender, time and space... John Donne wrote, "Love...makes one little room, as everywhere." Winterson's novel arrives at a similar affirmation

An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body...the result is a work that is consistently revelatory about the phenomenon of love

'This book is a deep, sensual plunge, a worship of the body, inside and out' The Times 
 
 
In a quiet English suburb, a love affair ignites. For our nameless narrator, Louise is the last in a long line of explosive passions, but the first to have broken their heart. With Louise's husband, Elgin, blocking love's course, their affair is doomed to unravel - until, that is, a terrible choice must be made. 
 With its witty and masterful prose, Written on the Body takes the reader on a beguiling and defying exploration of love and its physical forms. 
 
'An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body' Sunday Telegraph

A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd

Art & Lies

The best of Jeanette Winterson's remarkable, radical and genre-expanding novels, reissued in a bold new look ahead of the publication of her new book, 12 BYTES

If we want language to be handled with vitality and suppleness, if we want to consider serious questions of philosophy, art and sexuality, if we want writers to aspire to beauty, then we should be glad of Jeanette Winterson...she is a writer who will continue to astonish, to please and to vex. Art &amp; Lies does all these things

Winterson's belief in love, beauty, and most of all, language, is evangelical and redemptive...it is timely and exciting to read

'Brave and ambitious' Independent 
 
In a near-future London, Sappho, Picasso and Handel each set upon the same plan - to flee the city by train. Finding themselves fellow passengers, the poet, the painter and the musician discover their fates drawn together by the curious agency of a book. 
 As stories within stories unfold and journeys intersect, another world comes to the fore - one of painful beauty, where language has the power to heal. 
 
 
'Winterson's belief in love, beauty, and most of all, language, is evangelical and redemptive...it is timely and exciting to read' Rachel Cusk, The Times

Jeanette Winterson

A Love Story

***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019*** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020** 
**LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2020** 
 
'Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.' 
 
Inspired by Mary Shelley's gothic classic Frankenstein, discover this audacious new novel about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire. 
 
As Brexit grips Britain, Ry, a young transgender doctor, is falling in love. The object of their misguided affection: the celebrated AI-specialist, Professor Victor Stein. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his Mum again, is set to make his fortune with a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. 
 
Ranging from 1816, when nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley pens her radical first novel, to a cryonics facility in present-day Arizona where the dead wait to return to life, Frankissstein shows us how much closer we are to the future than we realise. 
 
'Intelligent and inventive...very funny' The Times 
 
'One of the most gifted writers working today' New York Times

Jeanette Winterson

Books by Jeanette Winterson

Series by Jeanette Winterson

A Fairy Tale Revolution4 Books

Shakespeare Retold9 Books

Vintage Heroines10 Books

Articles featuring Jeanette Winterson