Sexing The Cherry [Paperback]

Set in 17th century London, Sexing the Cherry is about the journeys taken by the boisterous Dog-Woman and her son Jordan: journeys across seas to find bananas and pineapples; journeys through time that weave snatches of the present with tales of Charles 1 and Oliver Cromwell; journeys in search of the self. As mothers go, the Dog-Woman takes some beating. She's a giant, wrapped in a skirt that could "serve as a sail for some wartorn ship" and strong enough to fling an elephant into the air. She's hideous too, with smallpox scars on her face where fleas live, a flat nose and black, broken teeth. To top it all, she's a "fantasist, a liar and a murderer". But her son, Jordan, is proud of her--who else has a mother who can hold a dozen oranges in her mouth at once?

Like the best of Winterson's writing, such as Oranges are not the Only Fruit and The Passion, the novel is engaging, ambitious and contrary. Alongside a hearty historical realism, young girls swoon in locked towers that don't exist, islands slip sideways in time and mysterious diseases wipe out towns and cities. Even though Sexing the Cherry is short, it is impossible to read it in a straight line--fairy tales and dreams run in and out of the text and it's hard to resist chasing them. There is an exceptional playfulness at work too--an unravelling of the most solid of historical facts and fantastically unconventional fairy tales in which princesses smash the skulls of their princes with silver candlesticks or become worn and grey "like old sweaters". --Jane Honey

'Entrancing... fabulous... Its language retains the clear music of poetry' Sunday Telegraph

Set in the 17th century, Sexing the Cherry celebrates the power of the imagination as it playfully juggles with our perception of history and reality. This is the story of Jordan, an orphan found floating on the River Thames, and his keeper, The Dog Woman, a huge and monstrous creature with a powerful right hook and a wide vocabulary. It is a story about love and sex; lies and truths; and twelve dancing princesses who lived happily ever after, but not with their husbands.

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

Sexing the Cherry celebrates the power of the imagination as it playfully juggles with our perception of history and reality; love and sex; lies and truths; and twelve dancing princesses who lived happily ever after, but not with their husbands.

'Simple prose shows the subtlest if 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

'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' Sunday Times

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

Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of ten novels, including Oranges are not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry; a book of short stories, The World and Other Places; a collection of essays, Art Objects as well as many other works, including children's books, screenplays and journalism. Her writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Prix d'argent at Cannes Film Festival.