Books were banned in the Winterson household when Jeanette Winterson was growing up, but the language of the bible and of Shakespeare still coloured her childhood.

Elements of the story are familiar to those who read her fictionalised version of this childhood in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). This memoir exposes some of the harsher truths and more bizarre incongruities. But it is also the story of how in later life, and recent years, the profound sense of loss and absence was catastrophically detonated by the end of a relationship.

Struggling to remain intact, still clinging to her passion for language and literature, the author began to rebuild her sense of self and the way she lives her life. Love arrived and so too did a sense of home - and with it the courage to go back into the past and find the person who had always wanted her in those first few weeks of life.

Funny, acute, fierce and celebratory, this is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother.

Read by Jeanette Winterson

Abridged and produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4. Show less