White Is for Witching

by Helen Oyeyemi

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, the gentle 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 father. She is leaving them slowly -

Slipping away from them -

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

Miri I conjure you

This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.

• ISBN10: 0385526059
• ISBN13: 9780385526050
• Publish Date: 23 June 2009 (first published 1 May 2009)
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Nan A. Talese
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 227
• Language: English

Reviews

[empressbrooke]

It is only 227 pages long, and yet I read the first 24 pages twice before moving forward, and then went back and re-read the beginning and bits of the middle after finishing. Oyeyemi packed a hell of a lot into a short little book, and it was beautifully written.