Peaces

Reviews

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2022*

One of:
O Magazine’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2021”
Chatelaine’s “4 New Books to Add to Your Spring Reading List”
LitHub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2021”

Praise for Peaces:

“Oyeyemi is a master of leaps of thought and inference, of shifty velocity, and the story’s long setup has the discombobulating quality of walking through a moving vehicle while carrying a full-to-the-brim cup of very hot tea. . . . [In Peaces,] Oyeyemi achieves the impossible: She unstirs the soup, reconstituting the links that bind her eccentric cast of characters to one another. . . . Every piece of the puzzle falls into place, but the picture is never made whole. Perhaps this is Oyeyemi’s point: To be at peace with the vagaries of human connection, you have to learn to find the wholeness in every part.”
—The New York Times
  
“Oyeyemi has a singular boldness of style [and] is a writer of wit and courage.”
―Guardian

“Oyeyemi's writing is gorgeous and resonant and fresh.”
―New York Times Review of Books

“A writer of sentences so elegant that they gleam.”
―Ali Smith

“One doesn't simply read her books but actively submits to them.”
―New Statesman

“Is there an author working today who is comparable to Helen Oyeyemi? She might be the only contemporary author for whom it's not hyperbole to claim she's sui generis, and I don't think it's a stretch either to say she's a genius . . . After reading any of her novels or her short story collection, you emerge as if from a dream, your sense of how things work pleasurably put out of order.”
―Los Angeles Review of Books

“Entrancing. . . . In lyrical, almost magical prose, Oyeyemi weaves a dramatic, exciting tale, in which Otto and Xavier must piece together what is real, what was orchestrated and who they can believe.”
—Chatelaine

“[Peaces] is something entirely new . . . disconcerting, captivating, disorienting, yet somehow grounded by universal questions about what makes us human.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Enchanting. . . . If you know Oyeyemi, you know this ride will give Snowpiercer a run for its money in the weirdness department. [Peaces] provides the setting for the most surprising, confounding, and oddly insightful couple’s trip in recent literary history.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“[A] deeply, intoxicatingly romantic novel . . . Peaces is elliptical and strange and funny.”
—Vulture

“A surrealist tale of love, heartbreak, and being haunted by the past.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A gay couple embarked on a fantastical Orient Express, a mongoose with attitude, a mysterious woman disposed to prophetic pronouncements: welcome back to the magical, maddening milieu of Oyeyemi’s singular fiction, in which trapdoors spring open and revelations emerge like Russian nesting dolls.”
—O Magazine

“Glorious. [Oyeyemi’s] descriptions of The Lucky Day’s whimsical cars fairly drip off the page, like honey. . . . Peaces will let you watch Oyeyemi develop a playful flippancy that is new to her tool kit. [T]his will be a fun book to watch other people try to talk about, in the same way it is fun to watch people try to talk about the works of David Lynch.”
—Vox
 
“Peaces is a humorous mystery. . . . At its core is Oyeyemi's brilliant prose. . . . Her voice and wit shine in the dialogue as well as the descriptions, events, letters, and literary curlicues that adorn the novel.”
—NPR

“Drenched in quirk and whimsy . . . [Peaces is] the stuff of Wes Anderson fever dreams. . . . 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.”
—The Guardian

“Oyeyemi punctuates [Peaces] with her signature humor, a kind of millennial mundane that grounds her otherwise fantastical works. . . . Despite much of the phantasmagorical nature of the novel . . . there is much that will feel all too real to readers dealing with trust and intimacy in a hyperconnected age, like suspicious texts from unsaved numbers or the opacity of the word friend.”
—The New Republic

“A fascinating and decidedly weird novel.”
—Business Today

“At its core, Peaces asks what happens when we are unable to recognize the most significant figures in our lives. Does that make us insane, or just human?”
—Toronto Star

“This is a delight of a book, which is entertaining from the very start to the finish. . . . Peaces is up there with the very best of [Oyeyemi’s] work.”
—Sheffield Telegraph

“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. Peaces turns the existential terror of feeling unseen into a corporeal reality. To live unseen is a tragedy, but Peaces continues Oyeyemi’s career-long project of helping us to unsee—unsnarling the neural knots that childhood fairytales tied in us.”
—The Guardian

“[A] delightfully surprising look at identity and what it means to be ‘seen.’ [Oyeyemi is a] magical realist master.”
—Electric Lit Expand reviews