Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson's searing yet ultimately uplifting coming-out, coming-of-age tale, in which a young girl learns to rebel against her fanatical, cult-like upbringing, and set out on her own path in life. To mark thirty years since its publication, here's another chance to hear the memorable World Book Club in which Jeanette Winterson discusses where fact meets fiction - there are distinct parallels to her own life.
Hear how important this ground-breaking novel has been for readers around the globe. British writer Jeanette Winterson is in conversation with Harriett Gilbert
(First broadcast in 2012.)
This is the last edition of the London Calling season of World Book Clubs - which have been going out each Saturday during May.
This week the programme are guests of The Nehru Centre - the cultural wing of the High Commission of India in London - and we're talking to acclaimed Bengali Indian author Amitav Ghosh about his haunting novel, The Shadow Lines.
A moving and thought-provoking meditation on the very real yet invisible lines, which divide nations, people, and families, The Shadow Lines focuses on a family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London.
From the tales of his colourful cousin the narrator conjures up a picture of London in his imagination that is so vivid that he recognizes it instantly when he visits years later and learns that real places can be invented inside your head.
Late in 1872, as the United States sought to clear the newly incorporated Southwest of its indigenous inhabitants, a company under Capt. James Burns came upon an encampment of Kwevkepayas (a branch of Yavapais) sheltering in the shadow of rock overhang above the Salt River Canyon. The soldiers wasted no time on the formalities of battle. They rained down fire, bullets ricocheting from the roof the cave, felling the refugees below. They even pushed down boulders. None survived.
Well, almost none. A few days prior, the advancing soldiers had come across a young boy of eight or nine looking for a missing horse. “They made a rush for me,” Hoomothya would later write. “They pulled me over rocks and bushes. The men didn’t care whether I got hurt or not.” But unlike Burns’ Kwevkepaya siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandfather, the invaders did not kill him. In fact, the man responsible for his family’s extermination would adopt the young Hoomothya as something between a son and a servant, renaming him Mike Burns.
Over a century later, the prolific writer and editor Gregory McNamee has brought us Burns’ remarkable story. In The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian (University of Arizona Press, 2012), Burns recounts his survival of the massacre, his time as a scout for the U.S. military on the campaign against Geronimo, his education n white schools, and eventual reconnection with his Yavapai community. “Mike Burns lived in two worlds,” McNamee tell us, “and he was at home in neither.” But his intelligence, humor and compassion illuminates both in profound and unexpected ways.
This week we've the third edition in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which are going out each Saturday during May.
This week we're talking to Howard Jacobson at the first Soho Literary Festival in the heart of the UK capital about his dazzling Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question.
A moving but often laugh-out-loud fictional foray into what it means to be Jewish Jacobson's award-winning novel features three old school friends who despite their very different lives have never quite lost touch.
Over dinner one balmy London evening they revisit a time before they had all loved and lost, unaware that an event later that night will change their lives for ever.
Andrea Levy discusses her novel Small Island with a studio audience, and the author revisits the West London setting of her multi-prize-winning novel.
A thought-provoking tale of love, friendship and immigration set in Earl's Court in 1948, Small Island focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own 'small island', move to England.
Once in the mother country, however, for which the men had fought and died for during World War II, their reception is not quite the warm embrace that they had hoped for.
Join Harriett Gilbert, readers in the studio and around the globe and Andrea Levy both in and out of the studio for World Book Club.
Coming up the first in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which will be going out each Saturday over the next four weeks.
In the run up to the London Olympic games we'll be discussing four novels which focus on different aspects of the United Kingdom’s colourful and historic capital city.
This week we talk to acclaimed novelist, biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd who will be discussing his haunting Whitbread prize-winning novel, Hawksmoor, with an audience at St George's Church, Bloomsbury.
St George's is the final church designed by lauded architect of the English Baroque, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a central and sinister figure in this compelling murder mystery set amongst the labyrinthine streets of 18th Century London.
The birth of the American republic produced immense and existential challenges to Native people in proximity to the fledgling nation. Perhaps none faced a greater predicament than the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (popularly known as the Iroquois). Divided by the U.S.-English conflict, their landbase ransacked by American soldiers and speculators, their once considerable political power reduced, and their culture threatened by an influx of zealous missionaries — such is what historian Matthew Dennis in his powerful new book, Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), has termed “the colonial crucible.”
Yet, Dennis persuades us, “the Seneca story is not mere prologue.” One of the Six Nations residing in what became western New York State, the Seneca adapted to the invasion of their homeland, building upon elements of their culture and selectively embracing change to survive the economic and political transformations of the post-Revolutionary period. The revelations of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, blended with elements of Christianity, yielded a new and powerful religion that rejected white degradation. But in the process, the prophet challenged the powerful position of women in Seneca society, as accusations of witchcraft – newly focused on women – led to violence.
As western New York continues its decades long process of deindustrialization, losing population with every closed down factory, the Seneca Nation remains, vibrant as ever. Matthew Dennis’ fascinating new book helps us see just how they did.
World Book Club celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of that modern classic novel Beloved with another chance to hear the programme with American writer Toni Morrison.
In 2009 Toni Morrison came to the South Bank Arts Centre beside the River Thames in London to talk to a packed audience about her Pulitzer Prize-winning, international bestseller Beloved.
Having lost none of its power to shock a quarter of a century on, Beloved stares unflinchingly into the abyss of racism and transforms history into a poetic chronicle of slavery and its terrible, unending aftermath.
Harriett Gilbert talks this month to American writer Jonathan Safran Foer about his novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Set in the aftermath of 9/11, it is the story of a young boy coming to terms with the tragedy of his father's death in the World Trade Centre.
After finding a mysterious key left behind in his Dad's closet, Oskar sets out across New York hoping to find some answers.
Both a meditation on pain, loss and the healing power of love - as well as an examination of the psyche of post 9/11 New York - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel that lingers in the mind.
(Image: Jonathan S Foer. Credit: Giuseppe Aliprandi)
