"Transcendent." —The New York Times Book Review
"Flawless. . . another masterpiece from an author who seems incapable of writing anything that's less than brilliant." —NPR
From the award-winning author of Boy, Snow, Bird and Peaces comes an enchanting collection of intertwined stories.
Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret—Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. In “Books and Roses” one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers’ fates. In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” involves a “house of locks,” where doors can be closed only with a key—with surprising, unobservable developments. And in “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think,” a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers.
“Magical and show stopping.” —Elle.com
“Oyeyemi so expertly melds the everyday, the fantastic and the eternal, we have to ask if the line between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is murkier than we imagined—or to what extent a line exists at all. . . The deeper one descends into the fabulist warrens of these stories, the more mystery and menace abound, and with each story I had the delightful and rare experience of being utterly surprised. . . Transcendent.” —The New York Times Book Review
“It is, in a word, flawless. . . Oyeyemi seems to be incapable of writing anything that's not wholly original. . . Oyeyemi manages to make the story both realistic and fantastical, and the characters are rendered with grace and compassion. . . [What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours] is a lot of things: dreamy, spellbinding, and unlike just about anything you can imagine. It's a book that resists comparisons; Oyeyemi's talent is as unique as it is formidable.” —NPR, Michael Schaub
“Oyeyemi’s fictional world is scintillating and eccentric, an ‘implosion of memory,’ as one character puts it.” –The New Yorker
“What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. . . boasts ambitious stories written masterfully by an adventurous author, and is another example of Oyeyemi’s skill at finding inspiration in the smallest and most ephemeral details.” —Women in the World, in association with The New York Times
“An enchanting and beautifully crafted first collection of stories, linked by the recurrence of keys. . . Oyeyemi’s storytelling is without parallel.” —BBC.com
“Oyeyemi infuses magic into the lives of contemporary characters.” —TIME
“Dizzying, baffling, and beguiling. . . The stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are unruly in the best way, drawing on pre-modern modes of tale-telling (fairy tales, Boccaccio, The Arabian Nights) to show they’ve lost none of their power in the present.” —New York Magazine, Vulture
“[Oyeyemi] again shows her ability to mesmerize and enchant.” —The Washington Post
“Oyeyemi writes with mastery, sometimes keeping her prose sparse and declarative only to unleash a bounty of description and humor a sentence later.” —Entertainment Weekly
“In this collection of short stories, there are many keys that unlock many things. . . What links them all? You’ll want to open and see.” —Cosmopolitan
“These modern fairy tales from award-winning author Helen Oyeyemi…will unlock your imagination with stories of love, loss, and. . . keys. . . magical, feverish, spooky, and delightful.” —Marie Claire
“The most inventive. . . story collection of the year.” –O, The Oprah Magazine
“Inventive and free-ranging. . . Combining the fantastical and the ordinary to dreamlike effect, these tales are full of tenderness, humour and strange delights.” –The Financial Times
“Summarizing Oyeyemi is like trying to tell a dream. . . Casual and accessible at the sentence level, [these stories] are not so much experimental as deeply comfortable with the pre-narrative and proto-narrative impulses at the heart of storytelling.” —The Chicago Tribune
“A potent and playful collection.” —The Boston Globe
“[U]napologetically odd—a goldmine for those who crave magical realism with surprising twists told through spectacular writing. . . Readers should take their time with each story, possibly rereading in order to glean as much of Oyeyemi’s intent and meaning as possible.” —San Francisco Book Review
