The style was still seen as that of youth but highly appropriate to its narrator. It was received as a remarkable achievement for such a young writer, hailed in the New York Times as вЂњa masterly first novelвЂќ and praised for how it вЂњbrilliantly conjures up вЂ¦ the melding of cultures and the dreamtime of childhood, as well as the power of ancient lore to tint the everyday experience of a susceptible little girlвЂ™s seemingly protected life. Using this device of the seemingly-imaginary double, and filtering it through Yoruba mythology, Oyeyemi offered a memorable depiction of cultural displacement, alienation and confusion. A вЂ¦ the leering idea of her motherвЂ™s country made her begin to struggle and thrashвЂќ), where she meets both an overbearing grandfather, and a mysterious spiritual twin called TillyTilly, who follows her back to London. So she kept her eyes on the ground, which pretty much stayed the same.вЂќ Much against her will she is made to visit her motherвЂ™s homeland (вЂњOn the plane she threw a tantrum. The book opens in a closet with our hero refusing to leave: вЂњOutside the cupboard, Jess felt as if she was in a place where everything moved past too fast, all colours, all people talking and wanting her to say things. The book focuses on Jessamy вЂJessвЂ™ Harrison, the troubled and disruptive eight-year old child of an English father and Nigerian mother, whose vivid imagination leads her to prefer a life secluded from the world. Twinned identities, cultural dislocation, narrative layers, typographical experimentation, and a beguiling authorial voice all feature in The Icarus Girl from the outset. That famous debut now makes sense in the context of her later books as having established her key techniques and themes. Spreading her wings both stylistically and thematically, she has consolidated her fictional talent and matured into a serious contemporary figure. As a result, she has had the unenviable task of growing up as a writer in public with her three further novels. Born in 1984 in Nigeria, Oyeyemi moved aged grew up in south London, where she sought solace from a troubled childhood in fiction writing, finishing her first novel The Icarus Girl aged 18, and having it published to great acclaim while she was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Thanks to the ferocious publicity blitz surrounding her debut, many readers are already well versed in the remarkable newspaper-friendly story of her early success. It is a versatility that has justifies her early acclaim, and in 2013 she was named as one of Granta magazineвЂ™s prestigious twenty вЂBest Young British NovelistsвЂ™.

Helen Oyeyemi has proved herself capable of translating precocious literary promise into a sustained career as purveyor of eerie and psychologically rich fiction.ДЇull of sinister doubles, dream worlds and confused identity, OyeyemiвЂ™s novels have applied what one critic has called her вЂњtrademark magic realismвЂќ to a surprising range of settings and subjects.

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