A New New Me
A Novel
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER
"Equal parts mischievous, moony, and tart...Her prose offers, in a single page, poetic candor, sly wit, dad jokes, and contemporary therapyspeak." ― The New Yorker
“Her weirdest and funniest yet — in the best way possible.” ― Los Angeles Times
"Audacious, incisive and very funny." ― Daily Mail
A masterful story that asks: What if the different sides of your personality had trust issues with each other?
New Day, New You!
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.
How many versions of oneself can one self safely contain?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Helen Oyeyemi’s A New New Me is dazzling, surreal, and completely original. Kinga Sikora isn’t just one woman—she’s seven. Each day of the week belongs to a different version of Kinga, and they keep their strange household running through meticulous diary entries, grudges, and passive-aggressive notes. But when Monday’s Kinga discovers a man tied up in their pantry, the Kingas must work together to figure out who brought him there and why. What follows is a wild, joyful collision of literary invention and emotional insight. Oyeyemi packs the week with bizarre side quests, haunting imagery, and deadpan comedy. Each voice feels distinct, and every sentence is infused with wit and wonder. It’s a novel about fractured identity, collective survival, and the stories we tell ourselves to keep going. Playful, profound, and gloriously digressive, A New New Me rewards readers who embrace the chaos.
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.
