Parasol Against the Axe

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, & finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie. 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 & who’s doing the reading, revealing startling new stories of fictional Praguers past & present. 

Uninvited companions appear at bachelorette activities & at city landmarks, offering opinions, humor, & even a taste of treachery. When a third woman from Hero & 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 & interpretation, & 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?

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Helen Oyeyemi is the author of The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, White is for Witching (which won the Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Fox, Boy, Snow, Bird, Gingerbread and the short story collection What is Not Yours is Not Yours. In 2013, Helen was included in Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists. Her most recent novel, Peaces, was published in 2021.