Pew teaches her how to ‘ keep the light,’ in which we see the lighthouse not only functions to keep ships from being dashed upon the rocks but that the stories told there keep lives from running aground as well. Central to the novel is the lighthouse, a dynamic metaphor of stability and a ‘ known point in darkness,’ where a young orphan named Silver lives with Pew, the blind lighthouse keeper of indeterminate (or maybe impossible) age. This novel gripped me from the very start and is certainly a favorite read of the year for the remarkable blend of prose, whimsy and chaotic brilliance that recalls Winterson’s early work but stands alone as a remarkable achievement. ‘ If you tell yourself like a story,’ the narrator is told in Lighthousekeeping, ‘ it doesn’t seem so bad.’ Storytelling is a defining aspect of humanity, an act that connects us, passes on history, interprets culture and helps us process existence, and here Jeanette Winterson turns their own masterful storytelling toward creating a moving and postmodern ode to the lasting power of storytelling. Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage.

She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote 'Great Moments in Aviation,' a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers' in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.

She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959.

Lighthousekeeping by jeanette winterson