What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Helen Oyeyemi

3.65 based on 2201 ratings & 476 reviews on Goodreads.com

'Pure, sensuous enjoyment' The 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.

Witty and tender . . . simple and beautiful . . . hers is a rare talent

Guardian

Transcendent . . . the pleasurable awareness of a story being told courses through the collection like electricity . . . Oyeyemi expertly melds the everyday, the fantastic and the eternal . . . with each story I had the delightful and rare experience of being utterly surprised . . . Oyeyemi has created a universe that dazzles and wounds

New York Times

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 . . . If you are seduced by magical realism - particularly the novels of Allende and Marquez - you will savour Oyeyemi's inventive tales.

Daily Mail

About Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, White is for Witching (which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award), and Mr Fox. In 2013, Helen was included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Boy, Snow, Bird is Helen's fifth novel.