Peaces

Oyeyemi is a master of leaps of thought and inference, of shifty velocity . . . Here, secrets are revealed, skirmishes ensue, and at the book’s end the story lands more Patricia Highsmith than Agatha Christie: a maze of identity and desire that has an ending, but not a solution.

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.

Disconcerting, captivating, disorienting, yet somehow grounded by universal questions about what makes us human.

Like all of Oyeyemi’s novels, Peaces goes to places in fiction that feel almost impossible.

Truly, God bless Helen Oyeyemi . . . This is a playful book, but it’s also a profoundly unsettling one.

A madcap existential mystery at the center of which are questions about how we see others and what it means to be seen or not seen.