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Gingerbread Helen Oyeyemi

Gingerbread By Helen Oyeyemi

Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi


£4.10
New RRP £9.99
Condition - Very Good
5 in stock

Summary

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.

Gingerbread Summary

Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi

'A writer of sentences so elegant that they gleam' - Ali Smith, author of How to be Both

Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children's stories - equal parts wholesome and uncanny - beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe.

Perdita Lee and her mother Harriet may appear your average schoolgirl and working mother but they are anything but. For one thing, their home is a gold-painted seventh-floor flat with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there's the gingerbread. As we follow the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work and wealth, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that holds a constant value . . .

Endlessly surprising and satisfying, written with Helen Oyeyemi's inimitable style and imagination, Gingerbread is a true feast for the reader.

Gingerbread Reviews

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 -- Stuart Evers * 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 -- Eowyn Ivey * 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 -- Francesca Carington * 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 -- Amanda Craig * 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 Tea 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 -- Stuart Kelly * 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" -- Catherine Taylor * New Statesman *
Oyeyemi's novels are shadowy, elegant and head into entirely unexpected territory . . . Original and uncanny * Mail on Sunday *

About Helen Oyeyemi

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.

Additional information

GOR010387859
9781447299424
1447299426
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Used - Very Good
Paperback
Pan Macmillan
2020-03-05
304
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Gingerbread