One Aladdin Two Lamps

By: Jeanette Winterson

Narrated by: Dana Haqjoo, Jeanette Winterson

“Enchanting, unexpected, and razor-sharp. Jeanette Winterson and Shahrazad are the perfect copilots 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 reexamine 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.

Critic reviews

"This audiobook blends manifesto, memoir, and myth. It alternates between first-person reflections from English author Winterson and performances of the stories of One Thousand and One Nights in English Iranian narrator Dana Haqjoo’s deep, rich voice. They are linked by the conceit that clever bride Shahrazad spins each tale to her royal husband, who promised to kill her when the stories end. Haqjoo uses dramatic pacing and a region-appropriate but carefully vague accent, transporting the listener to the nonspecific world of folktales collected across vast West Asia and set partly in an exoticized East. The author’s interspersed literary and political commentaries are firmly rooted in present-day Britain in their content and performance. The startling contrast between Haqjoo’s and Winterson’s chapters creates a fresh listening experience."

Great and thoughtful story

I really liked the presentation - very direct and personal. it felt like I was entering the author's world.