One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (2025): A Review

Title: One Aladdin Two Lamps

Author: Jeanette Winterson

Publication Year: 2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Pages: 272

Source: audiobook @storytel.tr

Genre: literary fiction, essay, memoir

Let’s just say Winterson is a modern Scheherazade here. Honestly, that could be the whole review. Unfortunately, the status quo expects a little more than me dramatically pointing at a sentence and saying, “That. That is the review.” So here we are.

Friends warned me that this was a memoir. Nonfiction, they said. What nobody mentioned, not even Goodreads which is very rude of them, is that this memoir reads like fiction, unlike certain books that pretend to be fiction but should be catalogued under “nonfiction, lecture notes, and emotional betrayal.” Yes, friends! You know exactly which book I am hinting at.

One Aladdin Two Lamps moves so smoothly and so quickly, even though you want to pause after every sentence to highlight it, annotate it, preserve it for posterity, and possibly whisper, “Jeanette, please calm down. Some of us are trying to have normal standards.” At some point, though, you stop pretending to be an organized reader and simply enjoy the ride. This pleasure doubles if you listen to Winterson narrate the book herself, because apparently it was not enough for her to write beautifully; she also had to read beautifully.

Winterson weaves her own life into the story of Scheherazade and the art of storytelling so seamlessly that, somewhere near the beginning, you forget this is nonfiction at all. Yes, I know I already said that. It bears repeating. She makes you crave the next sentence the way Scheherazade makes Shahryar crave the next story — except, thankfully, we are not facing imminent execution at dawn. We are, however, facing work tomorrow, which is its own form of tragedy.

And like Scheherazade, Winterson talks about everything and everyone: life, love, language, stories, survival, desire, memory, and probably the secret architecture of the universe before breakfast.

Reading this, especially after previously reading The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A. S. Byatt, gave me a sudden, dangerous urge to finally read my copy of One Thousand and One Nights. And yes, allow me a small boast: I would read it in Persian, from the copy I carried with me while moving from one country to another.

I have only just realized that I brought the book from Iran (the story’s original home) to Ankara, the place that became central to Byatt’s tale. Very literary. Very symbolic. Completely accidental, of course. The only thing stopping me is the sheer size of the book.

Both Winterson and Byatt look at Scheherazade from perspectives that felt new, sharp, and eye-opening to me. They reminded me that storytelling is not decoration; it is survival, seduction, rebellion, memory, and sometimes the only thing standing between you and the morning.

Oh, and I almost forgot: the whole book is technically about Winterson.

Just listen to the book.