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“... engines for producing extreme and ambiguous effects from simple elements. The title of Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel comes from the storybookish names of its three principal women, Boy, Snow and Bird – ‘a wicked stepmother and her daughters’, as Oyeyemi described them to an interviewer. Boy, Snow, Bird ...”

“... Helen Oyeyemi’s​ latest novel, Parasol against the Axe, opens with a playful monologue from its narrator, the city of Prague. Prague has recently found its way – ‘who knows how’ – into a WhatsApp group ‘set up as a safe space for sharing complaints about the capital city of Czechia’. ‘Some of the incidents referred to had taken place many years ago,’ it explains ...”

“... blocks of this polis (Arendt’s preferred term): in her intricate and playful novel Mr Fox, Helen Oyeyemi uses an English variant of the Bluebeard fairy tale to examine sexual conflict. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that I never spoke of to anyone, a work that has not become for me a matter for communication – whether to enthuse about ...”