Three adventurers, travelling through the desert, come upon the ornate City of Brass, its streets full of corpses. “A bony hand protrudes, a skull turns away from the sun. Look closer and beetles and moths are busy at their work of unravelling.” It’s a haunting image. Could it be a metaphor?
Jeanette Winterson leaves no room for doubt about that in One Aladdin Two Lamps. “This is a story about climate breakdown,” she writes solemnly. “A story about AI. A story about crypto. About arrogance. About humility. Greed. Adventure. Big Tech.” This happens every time the book starts to get interesting. Winterson insists on pausing the story at the good bits to rant about the terrible state of the world. “We are living in the City of Brass,” she adds, as if that wasn’t clear.
The book is part memoir, part polemic and part retelling of One Thousand and One Nights – tales Winterson grew up reading. “When I read this story as a young person, I didn’t believe in genii but I did believe in magical objects,” she says about Aladdin and his lamp. “Those objects were books.”
Nights begins with King Shahryar, furious that he and his brother have been cuckolded by their wives. Shahryar decrees he will marry a fresh virgin each night and kill her the following morning. When the kingdom is nearly out of virgins, he marries the vizier’s daughter Shahrazad. At night, on the verge of being killed, she begins telling Shahryar a bedtime story. By sunrise, it isn’t finished, so she is allowed to live another day. Each night, she tells the entranced king a little more.
Winterson rewrites some of Shahrazad’s tales, giving them a modern twist. In Nights, a merchant is eating lunch and throws away a date stone, killing a passer-by. A winged spirit, an ifrit, appears out of a cloud of dust and demands revenge: a life for a life. As the spirit raises its scimitar, an old man steps forward. He offers the ifrit a wondrous tale in exchange for one third of the merchant’s blood. But in Winterson’s version, this has an author’s note: “In those days you could buy/bargain/own outright someone else’s body parts including their fluids. I say ‘those days’ because in the US at the moment there is a battle over who owns a woman’s womb and its contents.” It feels like a stretch.
Mystical spirits are linked in similarly tenuous ways to modern problems. “In the Nights, anyone with magic powers can alter their size – smaller than small, bigger than big – genies that puff up to 300ft tall can pack into jam jars,” Winterson writes. “In our world, there are millions of women who have studied the dark arts of shrinkage… How many times have you seen the guy with the shirt gaping over his gut, tucking in to his pasta and red wine, while his gorgeous girlfriend eats a salad?”
Winterson has dabbled in fables before, with more success. Her best-known work, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), artfully blends Bible stories and tales of princes and princesses with personal narrative about growing up as a lesbian in a strict, English Pentecostal community. There are traces of that sharpness and humour in One Aladdin Two Lamps – particularly when she describes her overbearing mother putting up Biblical exhortations in the bathroom: “Linger Not at the Lord’s Business”, for people standing up; for those sitting, “He Shall Melt Thy Bowels Like Wax”. (This was optimistic, as her mother suffered from constipation.)
Winterson’s last novel, Frankissstein (2019), blended Mary Shelley with a modern romance between a transgender doctor and a transhumanist. That felt cutting-edge; the ideas in One Aladdin Two Lamps do not. Instead Winterson ruminates leftily on various topics: crime, crypto and why we should tax the rich and save the planet. “I don’t criticise young people. My generation has done serious damage to the values of civic society and the virtues of ordinariness,” she writes. “And the cultish doctrine of neoliberalism was/is the weapon of mass destruction.”
Progressive icons such as Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace are compared to the questing adventurers in Nights. “A young woman like Greta Thunberg is interesting because she started local and small – the way a hero should – and she has a cause that is worth fighting for,” Winterson muses. “She is not trivial and that is why she is hated by so much of the media.”
Having the narrative constantly interrupted to hear these banal political points becomes incredibly frustrating. The reader starts to empathise with the murderous king – desperately waiting for more of the story, dreading the dawn.
One Aladdin Two Lamps
Jeanette Winterson
Jonathan Cape, 272pp, £18.99
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes