One Aladdin Two Lamps()

Jeanette Winterson

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: Whom should we trust? Is love the most important thing? Does honesty matter? What makes us happy?

Posing as Aladdin—the orphan who changes his world—Jeanette Winterson asks us to re-examine what we think we know, to look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings. 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.”