A New York Times bestseller: The “magnificent” memoir by one of the bravest and most original writers of our time—“A tour de force of literature and love” (Vogue). One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years” Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. Her internationally best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, and has become a staple of required reading in contemporary fiction classes. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a “singular and electric” memoir about a life’s work to find happiness (The New York Times). It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, rose to haunt the author later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about the power of literature, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, or a life raft that supports us when we are sinking. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded story of the search for belonging—for love, identity, home, and a mother.

The New York Times–bestselling author’s Whitbread Prize–winning debut—“Winterson has mastered both comedy and tragedy in this rich little novel” (The Washington Post Book World). When it first appeared, Jeanette Winterson’s extraordinary debut novel received unanimous international praise, including the prestigious Whitbread Prize for best first fiction. Winterson went on to fulfill that promise, producing some of the most dazzling fiction and nonfiction of the past decade, including her celebrated memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?. Now required reading in contemporary literature, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a funny, poignant exploration of a young girl’s adolescence. Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette’s insistence on listening to truths of her own heart and mind—and on reporting them with wit and passion—makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood. “If Flannery O’Connor and Rita Mae Brown had collaborated on the coming-out story of a young British girl in the 1960s, maybe they would have approached the quirky and subtle hilarity of Jeanette Winterson’s autobiographical first novel. . . . Winterson’s voice, with its idiosyncratic wit and sensitivity, is one you’ve never heard before.” —Ms. Magazine

"Just twenty-two years old, Su Meck was already married and the mother of two children in 1988 when a ceiling fan in the kitchen of her home fell from its mounting and struck her in the head. She survived the life-threatening swelling in her brain that resulted from the accident, but when she regained consciousness in the hospital the next day, she didn't know her own name. She didn't recognize a single family member or friend, she couldn't read or write or brush her teeth or use a fork--and she didn't have even a scrap of memory from her life up to that point. The fiercely independent and outspoken young woman she had been vanished completely. Most patients who suffer amnesia as a result of a head injury eventually regain their memories, but Su never did. After three weeks in the hospital she was sent back out into a world about which she knew nothing: What did it mean to be someone's wife? To be a mother? How did everyone around her seem to know what they were supposed to do or say at any given moment? Adrift in the chaos of mental data that most of us think of as everyday life, Su became an adept mimic, fashioning a self and a life out of careful observation and ironclad routine. She had no dreams for herself, no plans outside the ever-burgeoning daily to-do list of a stay-at-home mom. The Meck family left Texas to start over in Maryland, and told almost no one in their new life about Su's accident. Nearly twenty years would pass before Su understood the full extent of the losses she and her family suffered as a result of her injury. As a series of personally devastating events shattered the "normal" life she had worked so hard to build, Su realized that she would have to grow up all over again, and finally take control of the strange second life she had awoken into"--

One of the most audacious and provocative writers on either side of the Atlantic now gives readers a dazzling, arousing, and wise improvisation on art, Eros, language, and identity. "A series of intense, artful musings that are exhilarating and visionary. . . . Unsettling yet strangely satisfying."--Newsday.

Zot lives in a world without colour – no green grass, no blue sky, no yellow sun and no red flowers. From his lonely mountaintop, he gazes at Earth, sparkling with brilliant colour, and thinks it must be a very happy place. He sets off to steal some of that happiness for himself . . . Visually stunning and thought-provoking, The Colour Thief is a heartwarming story set to become a firm favourite with fans of Oliver Jeffers and Jon Klassen.

This “thought-provoking and . . . unabashedly entertaining . . . novel defies conventional expectations and exists, brilliantly and defiantly, on its own terms” (Sarah Lotz, New York Times Book Review). Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mom again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead . . . but waiting to return to life. Since her astonishing debut Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has achieved worldwide acclaim as “one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time” (Elle). In Frankissstein, she shares an audacious love story that weaves together disparate lives into an exploration of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and queer love. Longlisted for the Booker Prize

The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. “At once a love story and a philosophical meditation.” —New York Times Book Review.