Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson’s wonderful semi autobiographical novel is a bildungsroman about a gay girl growing up in an English Pentecostal community. Her family are extreme religious fundamentalists who perform an exorcism on the adolescent heroine and her lesbian lover.

John Mullan has called it a ‘Künstlerroman’, depicting an artist's growth to maturity in the teeth of disapproval, and against the grain of an older generation's beliefs. Classic examples are Dickens's David Copperfield, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.

Oranges is a portrait of the artist as a young evangelist. Showing her fight for independence in quirky and sparkling prose, this is a towering achievement. It is also a very funny book and rattlingly good read.