Helen Oyeyemi reading an extract from White is for Witching

Helen Oyeyemi, author of White is for Witching, reads an extract from her novel at the Wapping Project, London.

From the phenomenally talented author of The Icarus Girl comes a mesmerizing gothic tale of a haunted family and a house that has seen too much

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

And 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.

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• Helen Oyeyemi
• White is for Witching
• Picador
• Book
• Literature
• London
• Reading