"The marvelous and the horrific, the mythic and the mundane overlap and intermingle in this wonderfully inventive novel." —The New York Times

Winner of the E. M. Forster Award

In a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth-century England, a baby is found floating in the Thames. The child, Jordan, is rescued by Dog Woman and grows up to travel the globe like Gulliver—though he finds that the most curious oddities come from his own mind. The spiraling tale leads the reader from discussions on the nature of time to Jordan's fascination with journeys concealed within other journeys, all with a dizzying speed that jumps from epiphany to shimmering epiphany.

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Sexing the Cherry is "a mixture of The Arabian Nights touched by the philosophical form of Milan Kundera and told with the grace of Italo Calvino" (San Francisco Chronicle).

"Those who care for fiction that is both idiosyncratic and beautiful will want to read anything [Winterson] writes." —The Washington Post Book World