Jeanette Winterson weaves together memoir, manifesto and a feminist reimaging 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 would 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 reread 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.

Winterson’s non-fiction work that blends her views on ranges of contemporary issues with some of the oldest stories we know, One Aladdin Two Lamps, and tells a tale each night to distract her husband, the ruler Shahryar, who has murder on his mind: she is “filibustering for her life”.

She rails against anti-women culture, from the Taliban to the reversal of Roe vs Wade, the landmark ruling that had enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion in the US. She argues that far-right politics. Lately dormant, is dangerous once more because of “the amplified age of the internet, where millions of followers will cluster around ideas rotten at the core”. She believes that “trans folks” should be “celebrated” but fears for women’s “exclusive space(s)”. She also ridicules the overlaying of contemporary mores on to writers from earlier eras: “The work itself is not confined to the mind, or the morals, of the person who made it.”

Are social media filters that change our appearance really a form of “coercive control”?

One Aladdin Two Lamps is about a series of ruinous love affairs, “when being save by Jesus no longer worked for me intellectually, I tried to find lovers who would save me emotionally”. She writes about passion about her birth mother – “When we met, we walked identically. How is that possible?” – and on the knowledge of something is missing, even before she knew what it was. “I learned to hide feelings I couldn’t manage and that no one else wanted to know about.”

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson, Jonathan Cape £18.99/ Grove Press $28, 272 pages.