‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’ is Jeanette Winterson’s controversial debut novel first published in 1985. It is a semi-autobiographical novel: the main character is called Jeanette and her experiences of growing up in a Pentecostal household in Lancashire and exploring her sexuality are heavily drawn from the author’s own life. It is a coming-of-age story like no other.
Having read Winterson’s memoirs ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’ last month, ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’ seems perhaps less shocking to me than if I had read these books the other way round even though the events are virtually the same. The novel is sensitively written but I found ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’ to be the more poignant of the two books probably because the distance of time after writing ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’ made her own memoirs more personal and reflective. Continue reading
Having got my craving for chick lit out of my system for another year, I have been reading ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ by Barry Hines, one of the grittiest books I’ve read in a while. Set in South Yorkshire in 1968 over the course of a single day, fifteen year old Billy Casper finds Kes, a kestrel hawk, who he learns to take care of and confide in. It’s an accurate and poignant portrait of life in northern England at that time (so my mother tells me) and although the book has a very specific setting, it has timeless qualities and themes that would still resonate with disaffected youth today. 
A Little Blog of Books 
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