“I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Readers love this wild and wonderful fable about self-mythology. On Mondays, Kinga A is deleting food delivery apps, but by Friday, Kinga E is happily soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath. Kingas A-G, perhaps unsurprisingly, live a varied life - between them is a professional matchmaker, a scent-crazed perfumer and a window cleaner, all with varying degrees of apathy, anger, introversion and bossiness. It’s an arrangement not without its fair share of admin, grudges and half-truths. But when Kinga A discovers a man tied up in their apartment, the Kingas have to reckon with the possibility that one of them might be planning to destroy them all.
Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London with her family when she was four. Her first novel, The Icarus Girl, was written while she was studying for her A-levels. With its mixture of Nigerian legend and the everyday life of the London suburbs, it tells the story of a young girl growing up between two cultures, while coping with the worries and strains of adolescence. An international success, The Icarus Girl was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.