Excerpt from One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He discovers that both he and his brother have wives who have been extravagantly unfaithful. We're not talking about a lover in the afternoon. No, these were toyboys of every shape, colour and size – and all at once. The fact that the two kings enjoyed harems decorated with wives and concubines is irrel-evant. In this world women belong to men. Possessions must not have a life of their own.

To avenge himself, and men the world over, Sultan Shahryar decrees he will wed a fresh virgin every night and murder her every morning. That way, she won't have a chance to cheat. Order is restored.

Understandably, the Kingdom is running out of virgins. The Sultan's adviser, the Grand Vizier, happens to have two he keeps at home, and so far, they have been spared. The eldest is called Shahrazad. In the West, we call her Scheherazade.

Shahrazad freely offers herself as the Sultan's next bride, by which we mean virgin sacrifice, and her father is unable to dissuade her by threats or promises.

As the Sultan brings Shahrazad to his bed, before the ritual beheading that will take place in the morning, his over-night bride starts to tell a story. The Sultan is intrigued, and as the story is still in tale by daybreak, Shahrazad is allowed to live another day – and night – and day and night, every story opening into another story, so that there is no time to die.


One Thousand and One Nights began as stories to be told round the campfire, or in the market, or crossing the desert, or in the cool of the evening. Like all stories that pass from mouth to mouth and hand to hand, they changed over time. New stories were tacked onto the skirts of old favourites. Fresh characters appeared. Popular latecomers like Aladdin and Ali Baba got their own mini-series within the whole.

There was no rush. It took, perhaps, four hundred years for the earliest tales known in India and Persia, in the 8th century, to join with later stories from Iraq in the 9th century, and onwards still, gathering fables from Egypt and Syria, until something like what we are reading now was caught together in one place, firstly in Arabic, and then in translation – the translations themselves bringing in new variants.

Stories have a way of escaping. Recombining. Defying neatness.


The untidy exuberance of these stories – taking their char-acter from where they land, finding their way through geography and history, mobilising different cultures and customs to extend their reach, cleverly settling wherever they are received, before moving on – is emblematic of humanity itself. No other species adapts to everywhere and anywhere. Hot or cold. Harsh or fertile. Sea and land. That is the human success story. Multiple. Teeming. Expansive. Inventive. Ceaseless.


Alf Layla Wa-Layla. One Thousand and One Nights is an overflowing bazaar of such stories: moral and immoral, by turns bloodthirsty and forgiving, bawdy and pious, accept-ing magic as part of everyday life, understanding, without the need for explanation, that the visible human world is only a part of the mostly invisible bigger world. In this larger world, different life forms living on different planes collide with human endeavour – for good and ill.

* * *

Life expectancy is core to the stories as it is core to the storyteller.

Non-biological beings are not subject to time as mortals are – they can live long, perhaps forever. The misalignment between human and non-human experiences of time is part of the comedy, and sometimes the tragedy, of these tales – especially so, as the tales are told by a woman whose life is in the measure of an hourglass.

Her only hope is to dispute the fixity of time.

Every night Shahrazad gains another day. She frees herself from her Time Lord by going into battle against Time itself.

And she succeeds. The single night allotted to her by the Sultan swells to a thousand more. And then, onwards, into a future whose beats cannot be counted.

Excerpted from One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson. Copyright © 2026 by Jeanette Winterson. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.