Books like Sexing the Cherry
Sexing the Cherry turns history into something bodily, unruly and impossible to tell in a straight line: a place where desire enlarges reality and the grotesque becomes a form of truth.
If you liked Sexing the Cherry, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Sexing the Cherry, and we tell you exactly what.
Few novels match Winterson’s combination of intellectual play, physical extravagance and bawdy delight as closely as Carter’s exuberant masterpiece. Its heroine, Fevvers, is a celebrated aerialist who may—or may not—have wings, and her account of herself continually wrong-foots the journalist trying to pin down the facts.
Like the Dog-Woman, Fevvers is too magnificent for ordinary ideas of femininity, realism or good taste. Carter makes spectacle politically potent: tall tales expose the assumptions hidden inside respectable history. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and now one of Carter’s defining novels, Nights at the Circus offers that rarest pleasure—a book whose wildness is also its precision.
Marian Leatherby is ninety-two, nearly toothless and presented with a hearing trumpet just in time to discover that her family intends to send her away. From that wonderfully dry beginning, Carrington ushers her into a world of sinister institutions, occult histories and increasingly sublime disorder.
What will delight a Winterson reader is the novel’s refusal to make women decorous, plausible or small. Old age becomes a gateway to adventure; absurdity becomes liberation. Long cherished as a cult classic, The Hearing Trumpet has acquired generations of devoted readers because it feels genuinely ungovernable—funny, visionary and gleefully hostile to common sense.
Poor Things arrives disguised as a recovered Victorian document, complete with editorial apparatus, contradictory testimony and Gray’s extraordinary illustrations. At its center is Bella Baxter, whose voracious appetite for experience threatens every man who attempts to define her story for her.
Gray shares Winterson’s suspicion that official narratives—especially those concerning women, sex and progress—are elaborate acts of possession. The novel keeps changing the ground beneath the reader: Gothic fantasy collides with social satire, while competing versions of Bella expose how storytelling manufactures authority. Winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, it is audacious, filthy-minded and formally ingenious—the sort of book that makes conventional historical fiction seem timid afterward.