One Aladdin Two Lamps
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 20, 2026
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"Enchanting, unexpected and razor-sharp. Jeanette Winterson and Shahrazad are the perfect co-pilots to take us into new worlds on the wings of old stories."—Kamila Shamsie, award-winning author of Home Fire
I can change the story because I am the story.
“One of the most daring and inventive writers of our time” (Elle) weaves together memoir, manifesto, and a feminist reimagining of One Thousand and One Nights in this impassioned exploration of the power of reading
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. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy?
In her guise as Aladdin—the orphan who changes his world—Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know. To look again. Especially to look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. 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.”
An alluring blend of the ancient and the contemporary, One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson’s newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future—an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic and fiction writer Winterson (Night Side of the River) anchors this dazzling memoir-in-essays in her childhood obsession with One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folktales that introduced magic lamps and flying carpets to the West. Casting herself as Aladdin, Winterson examines contemporary ills from climate change to doomscrolling—and more timeless concerns from misogyny to religion—in freewheeling essays that invite readers to take a closer look at the fabric of their daily lives. One minute, Winterson is proclaiming that social media's "weapons of mass distraction... shrink the human mind" and declaring phone addiction "a miserable way to live"; the next, she exalts fiction's power to illuminate "inner realities that gradually press forward into our outer circumstance." Faith in story eventually emerges as the book's main concern, with Winterson encouraging readers to apply a literary analyst's lens to the problems of today: "The present is often provisional," she writes. "We don't understand it till it's over." Though the concepts can be dense, Winterson's language is accessible and unfussy, and an irrepressible sense of play animates the project. By the time it's over, readers will feel like they're seeing the world around them through brand new eyes.
