What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
FROM THE WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD & GRANTA BEST YOUNG BRITISH NOVELIST
"What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours . . . boasts ambitious stories written masterfully by an adventurous author." New York Times
The stories collected in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked by more than the exquisitely winding prose of their creator: Helen Oyeyemi's ensemble cast of characters slip from the pages of their own stories only to surface in another.
The reader is invited into a world of lost libraries and locked gardens, of marshlands where the drowned dead live and a city where all the clocks have stopped; students hone their skills at puppet school, the Homely Wench Society commits a guerrilla book-swap, and lovers exchange books and roses on St Jordi's Day.
It is a collection of towering imagination, marked by baroque beauty and a deep sensuousness.
PRAISE FOR WHAT IS YOURS IS NOT YOURS
"Oyeyemi's imagination is impressive and vast . . . Her ability to conceive her stories on such a grand scale is what makes her work so magnetic, sucking the reader into any number of netherworlds." Guardian
"Alluring . . . the style and peculiar authority of this exceptional young writer will carry you carefully through the labyrinth and into a new and exciting literary landscape." Daily Mail
"Ethereal beauty and unexpected humour" Independent on Sunday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first story collection, Oyeyemi (Boy, Snow, Bird) conjures present-day Europe, made enticingly strange by undercurrents of magic, and populated by ghosts, sentient puppets, and possible witches alongside middle-aged psychiatrists, tyrants, and feminist undergrads. Loosely linked by a theme of keys and doors, many of the stories feature female protagonists discovering their sexuality or coming into their own. In " Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea," 14-year-old Aisha and Tyche, her father's colleague, send the goddess Hecate to torment teen idol Matyas F st for beating a prostitute; in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," Aisha's sister, Dayang, is a member of a women's society at Cambridge University, waging a good-natured war against the Bettencourt Society, a rival all-male club. "Drownings" is an allegorical tale set in a dictatorship where citizens are "drowned in the gray marshlands deep in the heart of the country." "Dornicka and the St. Martin's Day Goose" is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, draw on Eastern European history and lore. And in "Presence," a married couple in London undergo a pharmaceutical trial causing them to hallucinate a son they never had, a "makeless" boy. Readers will be drawn to Oyeyemi's contagious enthusiasm for her characters and deep sympathy for their unrequited or thwarted loves.
