Parasol Against the Axe
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Dorje Swallow
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By:
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Helen Oyeyemi
About this listen
“A shape-shifting novel about the power of stories . . . Helen Oyeyemi is a literary pied piper—her voice is the kind that readers gamely follow into the most bewildering and unnerving of situations.” —The New York Times Book Review
A tale of competitive friendship, elastic storytelling, and the meddling influence of a city called Prague.
In Helen Oyeyemi’s joyous new novel, the Czech capital is a living thing—one that can let you in or spit you out.
For reasons of her own, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation she was half expected to decline, and finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend, Sofie Cibulkova. Little does she know she’s arrived in a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. A book Hero has brought with her seems to be warping her mind: the text changes depending on when it’s being read and who’s doing the reading, revealing startling new stories of fictional Praguers past and present. Uninvited companions appear at bachelorette activities and at city landmarks, offering opinions, humor, and even a taste of treachery. When a third woman from Hero and Sofie’s past appears unexpectedly, the tensions between the friends’ different accounts of the past reach a new level.
An adventurous, kaleidoscopic novel, Parasol Against the Axe considers the lines between illusion and delusion, fact and interpretation, and weighs the risks of attaching too firmly to the stories of a place, or a person, or a shared history. How much is a tale influenced by its reader, or vice versa? And finally, in a battle between friends, is it better to be the parasol or the axe?©2024 Helen Oyeyemi (P)2024 Hamish Hamilton
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Critic reviews
“An intimate, opulent portrait of Prague.” —The Washington Post
"Mind-bending. Parasol Against the Axe is a book about a physical place, the stories that make up that place, and the disembodied plane on which those stories and that place meet." —The Atlantic
“Delightfully weird.” —TIME