PEACES

250pp., paperback, Reprint, London, (2021) 2022

A couple embark on a mysterious train journey.

"Intoxicatingly romantic ... Peaces is elliptical and strange and funny, and despite its Wes Anderson–like setting, it's a very bleak little cautionary tale. It proposes that failing to grasp someone's essential self is pernicious and contagious, that we mistake outlines and portraits for bodies and souls. This train story becomes a comedy of manners built around the gravest possible breach of etiquette: refusing, literally, to see someone.” New York Magazine

"Helen Oyeyemi is a bamboozler, a discombobulator, a peddler of perplexity. She crushes fables and fairytales down to a powder and then laces her fiction with it like some kind of literary hallucinogen. Her novels should come with pharmaceutical warning labels ... for all of her twee excesses, there are few writers who can match Oyeyemi’s creative glee. On a first read, Peaces works best when you stop trying to solve it, and instead surrender to that exuberance. Far better to sit back and revel in this book’s queer sensualities and the sherbet fizz of its wit ... Then when it’s over, return – clear-eyed – for a second trip." The Guardian