Parasol Against the Axe - by Helen Oyeyemi

About the Book

Book Synopsis

The prize-winning, bestselling author of Peaces and Gingerbread returns with a novel about competitive friendship, the elastic boundaries of storytelling, and the meddling influence of a city called Prague

In Helen Oyeyemi's joyous new novel, the Czech capital is a living thing--one that can let you in or spit you out.

For reasons of her own, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation she was half expected to decline, and finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie. Little does she know she's arrived in a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. A book Hero has brought with her seems to be warping her mind: the text changes depending on when it's being read and who's doing the reading, revealing startling new stories of fictional Praguers past and present. Uninvited companions appear at bachelorette activities and at city landmarks, offering opinions, humor, and even a taste of treachery. When a third woman from Hero and Sofie's past appears unexpectedly, the tensions between the friends' different accounts of the past reach a new level.

An adventurous, kaleidoscopic novel, Parasol Against the Axe considers the lines between illusion and delusion, fact and interpretation, and weighs the risks of attaching too firmly to the stories of a place, or a person, or a shared history. How much is a tale influenced by its reader, or vice versa? And finally, in a battle between friends, is it better to be the parasol or the axe?

Review Quotes

A New York Times Editor's Choice Pick

"Delightfully weird."--TIME

"An intimate, opulent portrait of Prague."--The Washington Post

"A shape-shifting novel about the power of stories...Helen Oyeyemi is a literary pied piper -- her voice is the kind that readers gamely follow into the most bewildering and unnerving of situations...[H]er stock-in-trade has always been tales at their least domesticated; her concern lies in form and the unruly patterns and peculiarities that allow stories to take on lives of their own." --New York Times Book Review

"Mind-bending. Parasol Against the Axe is a book about a physical place, the stories that make up that place, and the disembodied plane on which those stories and that place meet."--The Atlantic

"Parasol questions the boundaries between fact and fiction, and how the truth itself can change depending on who is telling or it, or where it's being told."-- W Magazine

"Bold, lucid, and experimental. . . Oyeyemi delightfully channels a Borgesian literary lunacy. . . This is a metatextual masterpiece." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

"Oyeyemi writes here as an heir to Calvino or Borges...A dizzying, dazzling romp." --Kirkus Reviews

"Like so much of Helen Oyeyemi's acclaimed work, Parasol Against the Axe defies a simple logline--which, of course, is to its credit as an immersive, variegated study of a city and the people within...you'll want to do all you can not to tear your eyes from the page."--Elle

"Oyeyemi's language, along with her ability to drop clues and invite questions without clear answers, makes the reading experience a world unto its own. . .The pleasure of Parasol Against the Axe lies in figuring out what is real and what is imag­ined--and if, in Oyeyemi's world, the differ­ence even matters." --BookPage

About the Author