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One Aladdin Two Lamps
  • Published: 18 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787336124
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

One Aladdin Two Lamps

Formats & editions
Hardback
18 Nov 2025
EBook
13 Nov 2025
Audiobook
13 Nov 2025
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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 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.
  • Published: 18 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787336124
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

About the author

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out.

Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, 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.

She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.

portrait photo of Jeanette Winterson

Also by Jeanette Winterson

Christmas Days
Night Side of the River
The Passion
12 Bytes
The Gap of Time
The Daylight Gate
The Powerbook
See all

Praise for 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

A dazzling blend of fiction, memoir, essay and magical storytelling… One Aladdin Two Lamps is a riveting look at humanity at an existential crossroads

Independent, *Novel of the Month*

One Aladdin Two Lamps is a passionate hymn to the supreme values of human imagination, generosity and love

Times Literary Supplement

A dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the [One Thousand and One] Nights… It feels thrillingly direct

Guardian

I just devoured One Aladdin, Two Lamps... A story about storytelling as well as a rousing tract about the power of reading. At its heart, really, it's about what it means to be human. I love the particularity of Winterson's voice: its intensity, its spirited seriousness, playfulness and wit... Makes you think and makes you laugh

Nigella Lawson