In the reign of Charles II, Jordan and his mother, the Dog-Woman, live on the banks of the stinking Thames, where they take in sights ranging from the first pineapple in London to Royalist heads on pikes. As a young man, Jordan leaves to travel the world, seeking wonder and knowledge, and learns that every journey conceals another within it. Sexing The Cherry celebrates the power of the imagination as it playfully juggles with our perceptions of history and reality; love and sex; lies and truths; and the twelve dancing princesses who lived happily ever after, but not with their husbands.

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"The most interesting young writer I have read in twenty years." —Gore Vidal

"Sexing the Cherry is fun, challenging, often astonishing. I wholeheartedly recommend it." —The Toronto Star

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

"A life-enhancing, gratifying book. Winterson's use of language is superb.... She has a beautiful clear voice." —Quill & Quire

"Jeanette Winterson is a remarkable writer." —The Bookseller

"Reading Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry is like discovering a new dance. The rhythms and steps are innovative. The language often has a punch of a tabloid headline with the precision of poetry. And the idea of time — past, present and future — can turn on a dime." —The Ottawa Citizen

"It simply needs to be read and re-read." —The Times

"Simple prose shows the subtlest of minds behind it, swift, confident and dazzling." —Financial Times

"Winterson is a superb literary acrobat. She makes us believe, for the duration of her tall tales, in the power of imagination to change the way we perceive, and therefore live our lives." —The Independent

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Visit Jeanette Winterson's website

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A novelist whose honours include England's Whitbread Award and the American Academy's E.M. Forster Award, Jeanette Winterson burst into the literary community as a very young woman in the eighties with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and soon won the praise of such masters as Gore Vidal and Muriel Spark. She lives in London and the Cotswolds.

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