White is for Witching is a mesmerizing Gothic tale from the phenomenally talented Helen Oyeyemi. On this website you'll be able to find out a little more about the book as well as events and press surrounding it. There is also the chance to read some bookmark reviews, and to request a proof so that you can submit one of your own.

Helen Oyeyemi

I grew up in Deptford, South-East London, where the Elizabethan poet Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a pub. There was also a church with a very detailed carving called 'The Valley of the Dry Bones' by the master carver Grinling Gibbons. There were also plague pits, and a tree that could be used to summon the shade of John Evelyn (around and around and 'John Evelyn' ninety-nine times). I've always liked stories, but best of all are the ones about battles undertaken out of ordinary sight - battles all the scarier and all the fiercer because only the people fighting them understand what's at stake: The Snow Queen, and also Marianne Dreams, about a girl who finds it harder and harder to wake from sleep as the sense of menace in her dreams increases...

I love Emily Dickinson's writing. She said her poems were songs caused by fear. I like Dracula because the first time I read it it took away my courage to fall asleep for a whole week. And its different narrators made me think about monstrosity and wonder what it could mean. I liked The Golem too, because it asks what a person does when they discover themselves to be a monster.

In 2006 I graduated from university, and that summer I did some volunteering in South Africa, where I caught flu and spent a lot of time in a dark-ish room with no Internet, feverishly rereading Dracula. After all that I began to write this book. I hope you like it.

Helen Oyeyemi

White is for Witching

A mesmerizing modern Gothic tale from the phenomenally talented author of The Icarus Girl.

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 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 her father. When one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.

Narrated by a quartet of voices, White is for Witching is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.

Picador

At Picador we want to get people excited about great writing. Our books are for everyone with a big imagination, and they range from spine-tingling to heart-stopping, from serious issue-led journalism to brilliant page-turning stories. Sometimes both together. We're very proud to be publishing White is for Witching; we know Helen has a glittering future ahead of her.

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