FROM THE WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD & GRANTA BEST YOUNG BRITISH NOVELIST

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.

"Oyeyemi's imagination is impressive and vast . . . Her ability to conceive her stories on such a grand scale is what makes her work so magnetic, sucking the reader into any number of netherworlds." - Guardian

"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." - Daily Mail

"Ethereal beauty and unexpected humour" - Independent on Sunday

"What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours . . . boasts ambitious stories written masterfully by an adventurous author." - New York Times

About the Author
Helen Oyeyemi is the author of five novels, including White is for Witching (which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird. In 2013, Helen was included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.