What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

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. Perhaps it's this ability to consume and be consumed that keeps Oyeyemi constantly, and prolifically, at work., Transcendent . . . the pleasurable awareness of a story being told courses through the collection like electricity . . . Oyeyemi expertly melds the everyday, the fantastic and the eternal . . . with each story I had the delightful and rare experience of being utterly surprised . . . Oyeyemi has created a universe that dazzles and wounds, Alluring . . . the style and peculiar authority of this exceptional young writer will carry you carefully through thelabyrinth and into a new and exciting literary landscape . . . If you are seduced by magical realism - particularly the novels of Allende and Marquez - you will savour Oyeyemi's inventive tales., Wild, luscious and startling . . . Oyeyemi glides seamlessly across time, space and genre . . . Oyeyemi's observations are as sharp as they are humorous. But she is equally at home in a more lyrical mode, her writing warm and sensuous . . . these gorgeously baroque stories are full of humour, tenderness, wisdom and strange delights, Enchanting . . . the breadth of Oyeyemi's imagination is impressive, teetering, as ever, on the edge of magical realism. Her use of fairytales, folklore and ghost stories is distinctly reminiscent of the work ofAngela Carter . . . inviting, luscious prose.

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including White is for Witching (which won a Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird. Helen has been included in Granta's Best Young British Novelists.