Helen Oyeyemi

The prize-winning, bestselling author of Peaces and Gingerbread returns with a novel about storytelling, competitive friendship, and a triumvirate of women on a reality-bending weekend in Prague. Literature is full of cities that are as unique and richly described as actual characters: Dickens' London, Edith Wharton's New York, and now, Helen Oyeyemi's Prague. Parasol Against the Axe captures the Czech capital as a living thing—one that can let you in or spit you out. When Hero arrives in Prague for her friend Sophie's bachelorette weekend, she has no idea what's in store. This city has a penchant for playing gentle tricks on unsuspecting tourists. A book Hero is reading seems to be warping her mind: the text changes each time she picks it up, revealing startling new stories about the city's history. Figures from Czech lore appear during bachelorette activities and at city landmarks, offering wisdom, humor, and even a taste of treachery. When a third woman from Hero and Sophie's past appears unexpectedly, forcing them to confront their friendship head-on, their sense of reality is further blurred. Who is the duper and who is the duped, and just who—or what—is shaping their story? An adventurous, kaleidoscopic novel like only Helen Oyeyemi can write, Parasol Against the Axe explores the lines between reality and fiction: When different narratives clash, whose version is true? How much can a reader influence a story? And finally, in a battle between friends, is it better to be the parasol or the axe?

A Novel

Parasol Against the Axe

Lindsay

The capital is the part of the country that most openly belongs to the world as well as to the nation. It’s a way in for the stranger who can’t or won’t abandon their strangeness. And it’s a last chance for the native who would otherwise rebel . . .

It’s possible to liken her most frequent facial expression to the “read” receipt that kills a conversational thread, or to a thumbs- up emoji sent in response to a confession of love.

A great many books are firmly closed despite the general impression that they’re wide open— they’ll jovially present their back cover as page one and be baffled that you thought there’d be more. Some of these adamantly closed books are also people.

Even if hope is your default setting, you do eventually need some sort of promise that a more binding promise will be made at some point down the road, and I don’t offer even that.

At other times he seems to understand that not only is the fear of being deceived a greater anguish than deception itself, but it’s almost completely optional.

There are times when reasoning aloud is like dangling scraps of compassion in front of someone’s nose just to show that there’s more where that came from; just not for them.

Parasol Against the Axe quotes

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