Gingerbread

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on Waterstones
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 5 Mar 2020 | Archive Date 5 Mar 2020

Talking about this book? Use #Gingerbread #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

‘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.

‘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...


Advance Praise

‘A writer of sentences so elegant that they gleam’ - Ali Smith

'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 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' - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday


‘A writer of sentences so elegant that they gleam’ - Ali Smith

'Endlessly inventive' -  The Oprah Magazine

'Rich, clever . . . lively and playful . . . both thoughtful and lavish . . . a bold book with...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781447299424
PRICE £10.99 (GBP)

Average rating from 96 members


Readers who liked this book also liked: