Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, which won the PEN Open Book Award, along with seven novels, including Peaces, Gingerbread, and Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Praise for Parasol Against the Axe

A New York Times Editor's Choice Pick

"Delightfully weird."--TIME

"An intimate, opulent portrait of Prague."--The Washington Post

"A shape-shifting novel about the power of stories...Helen Oyeyemi is a literary pied piper -- her voice is the kind that readers gamely follow into the most bewildering and unnerving of situations...[H]er stock-in-trade has always been tales at their least domesticated; her concern lies in form and the unruly patterns and peculiarities that allow stories to take on lives of their own." --New York Times Book Review

"Mind-bending. Parasol Against the Axe is a book about a physical place, the stories that make up that place, and the disembodied plane on which those stories and that place meet."--The Atlantic

"Parasol questions the boundaries between fact and fiction, and how the truth itself can change depending on who is telling or it, or where it's being told."-- W Magazine

"Bold, lucid, and experimental. . . Oyeyemi delightfully channels a Borgesian literary lunacy. . . This is a metatextual masterpiece." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

"Oyeyemi writes here as an heir to Calvino or Borges...A dizzying, dazzling romp." --Kirkus Reviews

"Like so much of Helen Oyeyemi's acclaimed work, Parasol Against the Axe defies a simple logline--which, of course, is to its credit as an immersive, variegated study of a city and the people within...you'll want to do all you can not to tear your eyes from the page."--Elle

"Oyeyemi's language, along with her ability to drop clues and invite questions without clear answers, makes the reading experience a world unto its own. . .The pleasure of Parasol Against the Axe lies in figuring out what is real and what is imag­ined--and if, in Oyeyemi's world, the differ­ence even matters." --BookPage

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Pub date: 2025-03-11

Length: 288 pages