THE ICARUS GIRL

325pp., paperback, London, 2005

An eight-year-old girl, the daughter of an English father and a Nigerian mother, travels from London to visit her mother's family in Nigeria, where she befriends a girl her own age.

"What promises to be a novel about displacement and confused cultural identity slowly turns into a tale about the personal quest for lost halves, doubles, twins ... extraordinary ... remarkable" Financial Times

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London when she was four. She is the author of The Opposite House, White is for Witching (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Fox, Gingerbread, and the short-story collection What is Not Yours is Not Yours.