A New New Me
A Novel
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning, bestselling “literary pied piper” (The New York Times Book Review) who brought us Boy, Snow, Bird and Gingerbread comes a charmingly surreal novel about self-sabotage, self-deception, self-love—and the many selves inside us sparring for control.
Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week.
There’s a Kinga for every day: on Mondays, you can catch Kinga A deleting food delivery apps. By Friday, Kinga E is happy to spend the days soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath.
Kingas A-G, perhaps unsurprisingly, live a varied life—between them is a professional matchmaker, a scent-crazed perfumer and a window cleaner, all with varying degrees of apathy, anger, introversion and bossiness. At least three of them are Team Toxic.
It’s an arrangement that’s not without its fair share of admin, grudges, and half-truths. But when Kinga A discovers a man tied up in their apartment, the Kingas have to reckon with the possibility that one of them might be planning to destroy them all.
An account of seven particularly busy days in an already hectic inner life from master storyteller Helen Oyeyemi, A New New Me cleverly asks: what if the different sides of your personality had trust issues with each other? How many versions of oneself can one self safely contain?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Oyeyemi (Parasol Against the Axe) unspools a confounding tale of a woman split seven ways. Kinga Sikora, 40, lives in Prague, where, each day of the week, a different version of her, named Kinga-A through Kinga-G, takes over her body and leads a completely different life. Each version records the day's events in a diary for the others to read, as they have no memories of each other's actions. Several of them scheme to wrest control from self-appointed leader Kinga-A, who works in a bank on Mondays and condescendingly chastises the others for such habits as ordering expensive takeout. Kinga-A also briefs the others about a strange outfit called the Luxury Enamel Posse, which breaks into homes and stuffs the occupants into suitcases along with a bunch of loose teeth and blank checks. What this all means remains elusive, but it provides context when Kinga-A discovers a handsome man named Jarda tied up in her pantry, who claims the posse is after him. On Friday, Kinga-E, a perfumer's muse, meets a fellow foreign woman named Milica, who turns out to be connected to Jarda, and the disparate threads spin wildly on their way to a surprising conclusion. The novel is hard to follow, but it's held together by hypnotic prose and a healthy dose of absurdism. Adventurous readers will enjoy following its twisty path.
