One Aladdin Two Lamps - by Jeanette Winterson (Hardcover)

About the Book

""One of the most daring and inventive writers of our time" (Elle) weaves together memoir, manifesto, and a feminist reimagining of One Thousand and One Nights in this impassioned exploration of the power of reading. I can change the story because I am the story. A woman is filibustering 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. To look again. Especially to 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 realizes through the power of books that she can read herself as fiction as well as a fact: "I can change the story because I am the story." An alluring blend of the ancient and the contemporary, One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson's newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future-an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

"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, award-winning author of Home Fire

I can change the story because I am the story.

"One of the most daring and inventive writers of our time" (Elle) weaves together memoir, manifesto, and a feminist reimagining of One Thousand and One Nights in this impassioned exploration of the power of reading

A woman is filibustering 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 explore new and ancient questions. 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. To look again. Especially to 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 realizes through the power of books that she can read herself as fiction as well as a fact: "I can change the story because I am the story."

An alluring blend of the ancient and the contemporary, One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson's newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future--an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew.

Review Quotes

Praise for One Aladdin Two Lamps

A New York Times New Book to Read in January
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2026
One of Amazon's best memoir/biography books of January

"[Winterson] reminds us that stories not only shape-shift formally; they transfigure us as we move through the world--unseen, organic processes, like cells replaced in our bodies."--Washington Post

"Again and again Winterson surprises us. Her "Nights" unfold as a series of opinion pieces, with Shahrazad (and Winterson) as columnists advocating for social justice. She links class commentary to "Nights," with storytelling a prized commodity not confined to elites but open to all, from every walk of life, an embarrassment of riches."--New York Times Book Review

"A dazzling blend of fiction, memoir, essay and magical storytelling. Drawing on the fables of Shahrazad, the legendary narrator of One Thousand and One Nights, Winterson rolls out stories, opinions and reminiscences like a flying carpet . . . [A] highly original dissection of some of the pressing philosophical questions of our queasy age: Who can escape their fate? Why are humans (well, men) so addicted to war and violence? Why is alienation the modern disease? Who can any of us really trust? Why are people so attached to objects as status symbols?"--The Independent

"A dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help . . . Thrillingly direct."--The Guardian

"Discussions of feminism and the patriarchy are easily folded into the story of a girl who will die at the hands of her partner if she fails to please him, but Winterson ranges wider. Just as the inventiveness of the tales in One Thousand and One Nights is always undercut by the grimness of their framing device, so Winterson's verbal exuberance is both playful and deadly serious; she has the intensity of someone who is demolishing you at chess while maintaining that it's only a game."--Times Literary Supplement

"One Aladdin Two Lamps delivers the formally inventive nonfiction that Jeanette Winterson is so good at, mashing up memoir, political commentary, and mini analyses of everything from Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale to Taylor Swift lyrics. But above all, it contains Winterson's extended meditation on One Thousand and One Nights."--Washington Independent Review of Books

"Is it fiction? Is it essay? Is it myth? The latest from Winterson is, fittingly, a little of everything. Loosely using The Thousand and One Nights as framing device, Winterson once again blends genres and modes to deliver an omnivoracious look at modern life through the lens of story."--Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2026"

"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, award-winning author of Home Fire

"Dazzling . . . an irrepressible sense of play animates the project. By the time it's over, readers will feel like they're seeing the world around them through brand new eyes."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A prolific writer across a range of genres, Winterson examines the richness of One Thousand and One Nights to argue passionately for the power of imagination . . . An ardent defense of storytelling."--Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Jeanette Winterson

"Winterson is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent deeply abides." --Vanity Fair

"Winterson's voice, with its idiosyncratic wit and sensitivity, is one you've never heard before." --Ms.

"To read Jeanette Winterson is to love her." --O Magazine

"Jeanette Winterson's sentences become lodged in the brain for years, like song lyrics." --Slate

"Winterson writes with heartrending precision . . . Ferociously funny and unfathomably generous . . . Magnificent."--Vogue

"[Winterson is] searingly honest yet effortlessly lithe as she slides between forms, exuberant and unerring, demanding emotional and intellectual expansion of herself and of us."--Elle

About the Author

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She is a beloved cultural icon and queer trailblazer who 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 three collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. Her novel Written on the Body was named one of the 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature by the New York Times. Since her innovative and forward-thinking writing about AI in her essay collection 12 Bytes, she speaks at tech conferences around the world. She is professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester and writes a popular Substack, Mind Over Matter. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.