The No1 Ethical retailer for Books, CD’s, DVD’s & Games
30 Day Refund Guarantee

White is for Witching

White is for Witching

by HelenOyeyemi (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2009

    $3.47
Synopsis

In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly, slipping away from them. When one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story. Miri I conjure you. This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.

$3.47

Save:$16.59 (83%)

Quantity

1 in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 256
 Edition: Main Market
 Publisher: Picador
Published: 01 May 2009
ISBN 10: 0330458140
ISBN 13: 9780330458146

Media Reviews
Oyeyemi delivers her third passionate and unusual book, a neo-gothic tale revolving around Miranda and Eliot Silver, fraternal twins raised in a British house haunted by generations of afflicted, displaced family members, including their mother. Miranda suffers from pica, an affliction that causes her to eat nonedible items, which is passed down to her via the specters from her childhood that now punctuate her nightmares. As the novel progresses, the increasingly violent nature of this bizarre, insatiable hunger reveals itself to be the ironclad grip of the dead over the living or of mother over daughter. The book is structured around multiple voices-including that of the house itself-that bleed into one another. Appealing from page one, the story, like the house, becomes extremely foreboding, as the house is 'storing its collapse' and 'can only be as good as' those who inhabit it. The house's protective, selfish voice carries a child's vision of loss: in the absence of a mother, feelings of anger, betrayal and bodily desire replace the sensation of connection. Unconventional, intoxicating and deeply disquieting. - Publishers Weekly, starred review Helen Oyeyemi is a startling literary prodigy. -- The Washington Post Book World There's an intellectual sharpness about the author's writing which is a pleasure to read. -- Financial Times Oyeyemi displays the young writer's amazing sure-handedness that is far beyond her years. --S eattle Post-Intelligencer Helen Oyeyemi leaves you obsessed with her characters and in awe of her talent. -- Glamour
Author Bio
Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London when she was four. She is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The Icarus Girl, which she wrote while she was still at school, The Opposite House, and two plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese .