Helen Oyeyemi, the prize-winning author of Boy, Snow, Bird and What is Not Yours is Not Yours, returns with a bewitching and inventive novel about motherhood, family legacy and . . . gingerbread.
Helen Oyeyemi is the author of The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, White is for Witching (which won the Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Fox and the short-story collection What is Not Yours is Not Yours. In 2013, Helen was included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.
Endlessly inventive
*The Oprah Magazine*
Rich, clever . . . lively and playful . . . both thoughtful and
lavish . . . a bold book with a great deal of depth and
mischief
*Financial Times*
Open this book, I entreat you, and get lost in a new country . . .
Oyeyemi's whirling sparkler of a story is loving, strange and
entirely exhilarating
*Marina Endicott*
Written with such verve and energy that it’s hard to resist
*Emerald Street*
One of our most singular and inventive contemporary voices. The
great joy of Oyeyemi's work is its sense of complete freedom . . .
when the quality of the writing - and the scope of the imagination
- is this good, it's hard not to be swept away . . . There is much
to revel in here: Oyeyemi's inventions are as surprising and as
deft as her modern-mythic prose style . . . Oyeyemi's sentences
continually sparkle with viciously precise humour . . . Gingerbread
is delicious
*Spectator*
Her sentences are like grabbing onto the tail of a vibrant, living
creature without knowing what you’ll find at the other end. It’s
absolutely exhilarating . . . Fans of Oyeyemi's will expect an
electric, genre-defying style, and won't be disappointed. New
readers should prepare to be dizzied . . . Gingerbread is jarring,
funny, surprising, unsettling, disorienting and rewarding. It
requires the reader to be quick-footed and alert. And by the end,
it is clear what has grounded the story from the start - the tender
and troubling humanity of its characters . . . This is a wildly
imagined, head-spinning, deeply intelligent novel
*New York Times*
Whimsical and mischievous, a modern-mythic romp that’s very clever
(maybe at times too clever), often frustrating, always fun . . .
Oyeyemi is a delightful writer
*Daily Telegraph*
The sly elegance and surrealism of Oyeyemi's writing weave a spell
around a story that once again concerns adolescent wounds,
misplaced love and family lies
*Literary Review*
Idiosyncratically brilliant, she spins a tale about three
generations of women and the gingerbread that is their curse and
their legacy . . . This fantastic and fantastical romp is a
wonderful addition to her formidable canon.
*Publishers Weekly*
Oyeyemi's great skill is to interleave and interweave the
fantastical and the political. In this respect, she is akin to
writers such as Téa Obrecht, Jenni Fagan and Naomi Alderman, who
manage to make the eerie and the urgent close. Gingerbread is at
one and the same time - like the double eyes - a reworking of fable
and an incisive look at class, migration, exclusion and loss
*Scotland on Sunday*
Strange, marvellously meandering . . . elegant and original
*Sunday Express*
One of the best writers alive today . . . Gingerbread twists and
modernises fairy tales . . . magical and also very contemporary
*Stylist Book Club pick of the week*
Like Harriet's ever-changeable recipe, Oyeyemi's novel is both "the
kind your teeth snap into shards, and the kind your teeth sink
into"
*New Statesman*
Oyeyemi’s novels are shadowy, elegant and head into entirely
unexpected territory . . . Original and uncanny
*Mail on Sunday*
You don't walk into an Oyeyemi novel, you plummet and emerge
transfigured and bleary-eyed . . . to describe Oyeyemi's fictions
as 'retellings' of fairy and folk tales minimizes the inventiveness
and heft of her literary contribution . . . Oyeyemi's prose is
joyously kinetic and ornate . . . her stories are like fun-house
mirrors, forcing us to confront our cultural distortions, to
unlearn the tenacious lessons of childhood fairy tale . . . . this
elusive, sinister realm is the triumph of Gingerbread
*TLS*
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