Helen Oyeyemi: White is for Witching [Spotlight]
From the acclaimed author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces
There’s something strange about the Silver family house in the closed-off town of Dover, England. Grand and cavernous with hidden passages and buried secrets, it’s 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, Miranda’s 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, Dover’s 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. The novel was a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award.
“After watching the first episode of Eccleston’s Doctor Who and Silent Hill: Revelation, I didn’t think it was possible to make mannequins any creepier. But, then came Helen Oyeyemi. If you’ve read White is for Witching, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, just know that this book has the creepiest scene in history and it happens to feature an even creepier mannequin. A scene that still gives me goosebumps.”—Not So Well Read
Helen Oyeyemi is a British novelist and writer of short stories. Born in Nigeria and raised in South London, Oyeyemi wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while studying at secondary school. Her works also include the plays Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese, as well as the novels Peaces, The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, Mr. Fox, Gingerbread, and Boy, Snow, Bird. Oyeyemi’ also has a story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, which won the PEN Open Book Award.
“Sometimes people ask me what I write,” the author told Annalisa Quinn at NPR, “and I say that I retell fairy tales, and they say, ‘Oh, children's books!’ And that makes me laugh. People say things like ‘I want a fairy tale existence.’ The Brothers Grimm would be looking at them in this astonished way, like ‘So you would like your whole family to be murdered and then eaten in a pie?’”
Buy White is for Witching from Amazon
Related:
