What binds the collection together is Oyeyemi’s use of keys, literal and metaphorical, that unlock (or not) the mysteries of what it means to be human. Who and the Brothers Grimm, YouTube videos and “The Lord of the Rings” and yet stand apart, a stylist like no other. It’s a credit to her protean talent that she can evoke, at least for one reader, A.S. Her first collection of linked stories, “What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours,” audaciously samples genres from fantasy to pop culture to science fiction to academic satire, creating a disquieting world that exists as a shadow version of our own. (Mar.Over the course of five novels, Nigerian-British writer Helen Oyeyemi has emerged as one of the most unnervingly original writers at work anywhere, thwarting expectations with a fierce glee. Readers will be drawn to Oyeyemi’s contagious enthusiasm for her characters and deep sympathy for their unrequited or thwarted loves. And in “Presence,” a married couple in London undergo a pharmaceutical trial causing them to hallucinate a son they never had, a “makeless” boy. Martin’s Day Goose” is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, draw on Eastern European history and lore. “Drownings” is an allegorical tale set in a dictatorship where citizens are “drowned in the gray marshlands deep in the heart of the country.” “Dornicka and the St. In “ ‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea,” 14-year-old Aisha and Tyche, her father’s colleague, send the goddess Hecate to torment teen idol Matyas Füst for beating a prostitute in “A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society,” Aisha’s sister, Dayang, is a member of a women’s society at Cambridge University, waging a good-natured war against the Bettencourt Society, a rival all-male club. Loosely linked by a theme of keys and doors, many of the stories feature female protagonists discovering their sexuality or coming into their own. In her first story collection, Oyeyemi ( Boy, Snow, Bird) conjures present-day Europe, made enticingly strange by undercurrents of magic, and populated by ghosts, sentient puppets, and possible witches alongside middle-aged psychiatrists, tyrants, and feminist undergrads.
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