'Briskly and breezily, 12 Bytes joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers' Observer

Twelve eye-opening, mind-expanding and provocative essays from Sunday Times-bestselling author Jeanette Winterson

Drawing on her years of thinking and reading about Artificial Intelligence in its bewildering manifestations, Jeanette Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, politics and, of course, computer science, to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now.

With wit, compassion and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI's most interesting talking points, from the algorithms that data-dossier your whole life, to the weirdness of backing up your brain.

'Her writing engulfs you in lucid, fairytale-like realities that take you on gender-bending and time-warped explorations of religion, love, sex, and sexual identity.' Independent

*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES AND EVENING STANDARD*

'Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't matter what'

This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts.

At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.

'Witty… extraordinary and exhilarating' The Times

'She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent abides' Vanity Fair

'Many consider her to be the best living writer in this language... In her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' Evening Standard

'A novel that deserves revisiting' Observer

'A wonderful rites-of-passage novel' Mariella Frostrup

The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.

This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true.

‘Unforgettable… It’s the best book I have ever read about the cost of growing up’ Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times

**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

'This book is a deep, sensual plunge, a worship of the body, inside and out' The Times


In a quiet English suburb, a love affair ignites. For our nameless narrator, Louise is the last in a long line of explosive passions, but the first to have broken their heart. With Louise's husband, Elgin, blocking love's course, their affair is doomed to unravel - until, that is, a terrible choice must be made.
With its witty and masterful prose, Written on the Body takes the reader on a beguiling and defying exploration of love and its physical forms.

'An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body' Sunday Telegraph

How do we love? With romance. With work. Through heartbreak. Throughout a lifetime. As a means, but not an end. Love in all its forms has been an abiding theme of Jeanette Winterson’s writing. Here are selections from her books about that impossible, essential force, stories and truths that search for the mythical creature we call Love.

Selected from the books of Jeanette Winterson

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.

A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human

Also in the Vintage Minis series:
Eating by Nigella Lawson
Jealousy by Marcel Proust
Babies by Anne Enright
Desire by Haruki Murakami

Lose yourself in the tortured love lives of expats in 1920s Paris in this iconic cult classic.

'Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass ... From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.' Jeanette Winterson

'Like a dark lesbian genius rolling in a giant heap of damp, dead leaves. What a great, shaking, grieving party this book is - the best.' Eileen Myles

'I read with the aching intensity of a person possessed ... The story of passion and grief, of exile and loneliness, spoke directly to me, a young woman who [never] felt she quite belonged ... A hymn to the dispossessed, the misbegotten and those who love too much.' Siri Hustvedt

Nightwood tells the stories of the love-lives of a group of American expats and Europeans in Paris in the 1920s - an exotic, night-time underworld, eccentric, seedy and beautiful. A modernist masterpiece, and one of the earliest novels to explicitly portray homosexuality, the influence of Djuna Barnes's novel remains exceptional.

'A bold, exceptionally well-written modernist prose poem ... The closest thing to James Joyce.' Andre Aciman

'The great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.' T.S. Eliot

'One of the greatest books of the twentieth century.' William S. Burroughs

'A writer of wild and original gifts . To her name there is always to be attached the splendor of Nightwood, a lasting achievement of her great gifts and eccentricities - her passionate prose and, in this case, a genuineness of human passions.' Elizabeth Hardwick

From one of Britain’s best-loved literary novelists comes a magical, lyrical tale of the young orphan Silver, taken in by the ancient lighthousekeeper Mr. Pew, who reveals to her a world of myth and mystery through the art of storytelling.

Motherless and anchorless, Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of the slippages that occur throughout every life. One life, Babel Dark’s, a nineteenth-century clergyman, opens like a map that Silver must follow, and the intertwining of myth and reality, of storytelling and experience, lead her through her own particular darkness.

A story of mutability, talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, Lighthousekeeping is a way into the most secret recesses of our own hearts and minds. Jeanette Winterson is one of the most extraordinary and original writers of her generation, and this shows her at her lyrical best.

***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019***
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020**
**LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2020**

'Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.'

Inspired by Mary Shelley's gothic classic Frankenstein, discover this audacious new novel about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire.

As Brexit grips Britain, Ry, a young transgender doctor, is falling in love. The object of their misguided affection: the celebrated AI-specialist, Professor Victor Stein. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his Mum again, is set to make his fortune with a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere.

Ranging from 1816, when nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley pens her radical first novel, to a cryonics facility in present-day Arizona where the dead wait to return to life, Frankissstein shows us how much closer we are to the future than we realise.

'Intelligent and inventive...very funny' The Times

'One of the most gifted writers working today' New York Times

'A fantasy, a vivid dream...inventive and brilliant' Guardian

Henri has a passion for Napoleon - but Napoleon has a passion for chicken. As soldier and emperor butcher their way across Europe, glory falls to ruin and love turns to hate.

But, when Henri encounters the red-haired, web-footed Villanelle, he discovers in her an equal. Together they abandon their pasts, and flee to the Venetian canals to meet their singular destiny in the city of chance and disguises.

'A deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so.' New York Times

'A book of innocence and bawdiness, fury and joy...needs to be read and re-read' The Times


On the banks of the Thames a baby is found floating. Rescued by the Dog-Woman, a giant strong enough to fling an elephant into the air, their lives together will take them on a dizzying journey through space and time.

As past and present collapse and centuries overlap, love, sex, truth, lies and twelve dancing princesses take centre stage.


'Entrancing...fabulous... Its language retains the clear music of poetry' Sunday Telegraph

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

'Her stories and characters levitate off the page into dancing life... A bold, bizarre and timely book' Independent