Innovative in style, its humour by turns punchy and tender, Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession. It’s a love story, too. Winterson’s adaptation of the novel was an internationally acclaimed television drama awarded a BAFTA for best drama and an RTS award in the same year; the Prix Italia; FIPA D’Argent at Cannes for best script; The Golden Gate in San Francisco and an ACE Award at the Los Angeles television festival.

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles. Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical novel is one of the most beautifully written story of a middle-class girl struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality, creativity, passion vs. her family/society's inflexible "formed opinions". The story of the persecution of a girl because of her sexual preference (in this case, lesbianism) is not new. It's how Ms. Winterson presents her story. Fresh. Alive. Witty. Funny. Heartbreaking at times. Imaginative. Almost like you were holding a piece of someone's soul in your hands rather than merely a book. I noticed that one reviewer mentioned that the book's sexual nature is vulgar. I do not find this so. Even if it is, so what? Life is vulgar. Only those fond of sweeping the dirt under the carpet so that it stays out of sight (or those who drive lesbian girls from their house/church and pretend they don't exist) will disagree with the innate vulgarity of all life. This book is the antidote for that kind of sanitized thinking. This book exposes that sanitized Christian middle-class thinking is weird, almost alien when observed sanely by a third party standing on the outside. This book celebrates life. Read it.

The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit