Mr Fox

From a prizewinning young writer, a brilliant and inventive story of love, lies, and inspiration.

Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding, and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, the celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently.

Mary challenges Mr. Fox to join her in stories of their own devising; and in different times and places, the two of them seek each other, find each other, thwart each other, and try to stay together, even when the roles they inhabit seem to forbid it. Their adventures twist the fairy tale into nine variations, exploding and teasing conventions of genre and romance, and each iteration explores the fears that come with accepting a lifelong bond. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Fox's game. And so Mr. Fox is offered a choice: Will it be a life with the girl of his dreams, or a life with an all-too-real woman who delights him more than he cares to admit?

The extraordinarily gifted Helen Oyeyemi has written a love story like no other. Mr. Fox is a magical book, endlessly inventive, as witty and charming as it is profound in its truths about how we learn to be with one another.

---Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air

"A wonderfully original novel, full of images and turns of phrase so arresting, so vivid and inventive, its pages almost glow with them. Helen Oyeyemi has given us a work of playful charm and serious narrative pleasure."

--Sarah Waters

“Oyeyemi has an eye for the gently perverse, the odd detail that turns the ordinary marvelously, frighteningly strange.”—The Boston Globe

“Dazzling.”—The Washington Post

“Cheeky and imaginative.”—The New Yorker

“Startling, beautiful . . . [Mr. Fox] should not be ignored.”—Chicago Sun Times

“Mr. Fox is a wonderfully original novel, full of images and turns of phrase so arresting, so vivid and inventive, its pages almost glow with them. Helen Oyeyemi has given us a work of playful charm and serious narrative pleasure.”—Sarah Waters, author of The Little Stranger

"A sly, tender, and elegant novel, graced with a magical charm that makes this novel’s wisdom about love and loss all the more captivating to read. Mr. Fox is a novel for those who love stories and who believe in their singular power to alter and heal our fragile souls."--Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air

“Oyeyemis writing is gorgeous and resonant and fresh . . . a shimmering landscape pulsating with life.”

—Aimee Bender, The New York Times Book Review

“Startling, beautiful . . . [Mr. Fox] should not be ignored.”

—M. E. Collins, Chicago Sun-Times

“Oyeyemi has an eye for the gently perverse, the odd detail that turns the ordinary marvelously, frighteningly strange.”

—Jenny Hendrix, The Boston Globe

“Dazzling.”

—Kerry Fried, The Washington Post

—The New York Times Book Review

“Profoundly chilling . . . a slow-building neo-Gothic that will leave persevering readers breathless.”

—The Boston Globe

“If youve been missing Shirley Jackson all these many years . . . heres a writer who seems to be a direct heir to that lamented ones gothic throne.”

—The Austin Chronicle

“Superbly atmospheric. . . . The dark tones of Poe in her haunting have also the elasticity of Haruki Murakamis surreal mental landscapes.”

—The Independent (UK)

“[Oyeyemis] technical skill as a novelist is remarkable, her range of reference formidable and her use of language virtuosic.”

—The Daily Telegraph (UK) 

"Appealing from page one.... Unconventional, intoxicating and deeply disquieting."

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Laced with thought-provoking story lines."

—Booklist 

“Gloriously unsettling…the greatest joy of reading Oyeyemi will always be style: jagged and capricious at moments, lush and rippled at others, always singular, like the voice-over of a fever dream.”

—The New York Times Book Review 

“With her fifth novel, 29-year-old Helen Oyeyemi has fully transformed from a literary prodigy into a powerful, distinctive storyteller…[Boy, Snow, Bird is] transfixing and surprising.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“The outline of [Oyeyemis] remarkable career glimmers with pixie dust... Her latest novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, continues on this bewitching path…the atmosphere of fantasy lingers over these pages like some intoxicating incense….Under Oyeyemis spell, the fairy-tale conceit makes a brilliant setting in which to explore the alchemy of racism, the weird ways in which identity can be transmuted in an instant — from beauty to beast or vice versa.”

—Ron Charles, The Washington Post  

“By transforming ‘Snow White into a tale that hinges on race and cultural ideas about beauty — the danger of mirrors indeed — Oyeyemi finds a new, raw power in the classic. In her hands, the story is about secrets and lies, mothers and daughters, lost sisters and the impossibility of seeing oneself or being seen in a brutally racist world… [Oyeyemi] elegantly and inventively turns a classic fairy tale inside out.”

—Los Angeles Times 

“Oyeyemi is something rare — a born novelist, who gets better every book. Boy, Snow, Bird is an enchanting retelling of Snow White that mixes questions of beauty and vanity with issues of race.”

—Cosmopolitan

“[Oyeyemi] is the literary heir of the late, great Angela Carter, a writer whose fiction glides from swirling archetype and folklore to the wised-up observations of a thoroughly modern womanhood.”

—Laura Miller, Salon

"This imaginative novel explores identity, race and family, arguing in brilliant language that black, white, good, evil, beauty and monstrosity are different sides of a single, awesome truth."

—People 

“Superbly inventive…examines the thorniness of race and the poisonous ways in which vanity and envy can permeate and distort perception.”

—O, The Oprah Magazine

“[Boy, Snow, Bird] explores powerful themes, such as self-perception, race relations, and the role appearance plays in relationships.”

—Real Simple 

“Like Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter in the 80s, and Jeanette Winterson in the 90s, Oyeyemi has taken a page from Lewis Carrolls “Alice in Wonderland” and inverted it, turning the malevolence of a reflecting gaze upon itself, and making it, possibly, amazingly, a positive thing. This — more than her narrative special effects — is the extraordinary feat of Boy, Snow, Bird. In her first four books, Oyeyemi wrote with the same chilly precision as Patricia Highsmith. The performance was mesmerizing, sinister, and creepy. With this book she proves an even great ability: she can thaw a heart.”

—John Freeman, Boston Globe

“Like Hitchcock, Oyeyemi is interested not merely in what happens when you attempt to pass for someone else, but in the porous boundaries between one self and another… [Boy, Snow, Bird is] an intriguing, sinuously attractive book.”

—The Guardian 

“Riveting, brilliant and emotionally rich…with fully realized characters, startling images, original observations and revelatory truths, this masterpiece engages the readers heart and mind as it captures both the complexities of racial and gender identity in the 20th century and the more intimate complexities of love in all its guises.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Oyeyemi wields her words with economy and grace, and she rounds out her story with an inventive plot and memorable characters.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This novel is some kind of wonderful.”

—Ebony.com

“Potent and vividly written…Oyeyemi is a wizard with metaphor…you havent got a pulse if youre not shocked by the reveal at the end.”

—NOW Magazine

“Defies classification…Oyeyemi isnt just pulling the rug out from under our feet, playing with our assumptions about how people look—shes holding a mirror up to our memories of fairy tales and of history...Stunning and enchanting.”

—Slate 

“Helen Oyeyemi is a freaking genius. Her books are so bizarre and brilliant… Write this one down somewhere youll remember - like your forehead - because you dont want to miss it.”

—Bookriot

“Incandescent…stunning…utterly enchanting.”

—A.V. Club

“This is the novel that will get everybody to agree that Helen Oyeyemi is operating on another level, if they havent admitted that already. Bending and twisting fairy tales, Oyeyemi is capable of a sort of magic that will leave you gasping for breath.”

—Flavorwire 

“Oyeyemi's [voice is] startlingly distinctive yet always undulating…[Boy, Snow, Bird is] a fresh, memorable tale.”

—The Huffington Post

“Both exquisitely beautiful and strange… Oyeyemi casts a powerful light on the absurdities accompanying the history of race in America and the Western world, while taking us to the landscape of Grimms Fairy Tales. She brilliantly raises the questions of what identifies us racially: Is it our color? Our genes? Our history? Our culture?...It is a powerful examination of the way we see others and the way others see us. And therein lies the beauty of Oyeyemis tale; we all are not, as Boy, Snow, Bird convinces us, what we appear to be, even to ourselves.”

—Dallas Morning News 

“Boy, Snow, Bird is Helen Oyeyemis fifth novel, and it just might be her finest. Its certainly her most readily accessible…. How [her characters] try and tragically fail to relate to one another proves particularly powerful, as exemplified by the perversely gratifying last act…I couldnt have stopped reading at this point if Id wanted to.… a beautiful book.”

—Tor.com

“Commanding and incisive… However strong your sense of personal identity, Boy, Snow, Bird is likely, if youre reading it right, to make you a bit uncomfortable in your own skin, and thats quite an achievement.”

—The Grio

One of Grantas Best Young British Novelists

From the acclaimed author of Boy, Snow, Bird

Fairytale romances end with a wedding. The fairytales that dont get more complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox cant stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. Its not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Foxs game. And so Mr. Fox is offered a choice: Will it be a life with the girl of his dreams, or a life with an all-too-real woman who delights him more than he cares to admit?

In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life shes left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman.

A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined shed become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boys daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.

Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.

One of Grantas Best Young British Novelists

From the acclaimed author of Boy, Snow, Bird

Theres something strange about the Silver family house in the closed-off town of Dover, England. Grand and cavernous with hidden passages and buried secrets, its been home to four generations of Silver women—Anna, Jennifer, Lily, and now Miranda, who has lived in the house with her twin brother, Eliot, ever since their father converted it to a bed-and-breakfast. The Silver women have always had a strong connection, a pull over one another that reaches across time and space, and when Lily, Mirandas mother, passes away suddenly while on a trip abroad, Miranda begins suffering strange ailments. An eating disorder starves her. She begins hearing voices. When she brings a friend home, Dovers hostility toward outsiders physically manifests within the four walls of the Silver house, and the lives of everyone inside are irrevocably changed. At once an unforgettable mystery and a meditation on race, nationality, and family legacies, White is for Witching is a boldly original, terrifying, and elegant novel by a prodigious talent.

“Helen Oyeyemi has fully transformed from a literary prodigy into a powerful, distinctive storyteller…Transfixing and surprising.”—Entertainment Weekly (