Meet author Helen Oyeyemi

Books and Books Coral Gables June 22nd, 2007Books and Books Coral Gables is presenting an evening with young author Helen Oyeyemi on June 22nd, 2007 at 8:00 p.m. Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and has lived in London from the age of four. She is the author of the highly acclaimed novel, The Icarus Girl, which she wrote before her nineteenth birthday; The Icarus Girl was short-listed for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Helen Oyeyemi graduated from Cambridge University in 2006. In a dazzling follow-up to The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women and their search for the truth about faith and identity. Maja was five years old when her black Cuban family emigrated from the Caribbean to London. Now, almost twenty years later, Maja is a singer, in love with Aaron, pregnant, and haunted by what she calls “her Cuba.” Growing up in London, she has struggled to negotiate her history and the sense that speaking Spanish or English made her less of a black girl. But she is unable to find herself in the Ewe, Igbo, or Akum of her roots. It seems all that’s left is silence. Meanwhile distance from Cuba has only deepened Maja’s mother’s faith in Santería, but it also divides the family as her father rails against his wife’s superstitions and the lost dreams of the Castro revolution. Lyrical and intensely moving, The Opposite House is about the disquiet that follows us across places and languages, a feeling passed down from mother and father to son and daughter. For more information, please call: 305.444.9044