She is the author to date of seven novels, two plays and one short story collection. Since leaving Cambridge, Oyeyemi has lived a peripatetic life in Paris, Toronto, London, Berlin, Budapest, and Prague, among other global cities. At 18, Oyeyemi began work on her first novel, The Icarus Girl (2005), which was published while Oyeyemi was a social and political sciences student at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

An imaginative and introspective child, Oyeyemi struggled with clinical depression throughout her school years, finding comfort in reading, writing and rewriting her favourite stories. BEHIND THE PENīorn in Nigeria in 1984, Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi moved with her family at the age of four to Lewisham in South London. Helen Oyeyemi plays with both tropes at once in The Icarus Girl, and presents a bold narrative about lost innocence and the ways you can never go home again. Whether you clutch your pearls at the thought of precious innocents in danger or find little kids to be extremely creepy to begin with, few things bring the terror like the involvement of a child. Agent, Robin Wade.By have been a longstanding part of horror. As sophisticated as she is, Jess's eight-year-old observations provide a limited lens, and at times, the novel's fantasy element veers into young adult suspense territory. In confident, heavily stylized prose, Oyeyemi illustrates Jess's cultural dislocation, using both Nigerian and Christian imagery to evoke a sense of her unreality. In Nigeria with TillyTilly, Jess finds a sense of belonging and intimacy for the first time, but when Jess returns to England, TillyTilly becomes less comforting and more troublesome. At her grandfather's compound, she encounters TillyTilly, a mysterious girl who seems to know everything about Jess and who, Jess realizes, is not visible to anyone else. As an intervention, her parents take her to stay with family in Nigeria for the summer. The sensitive protagonist, Jessamy Harrison, born to a British father and Nigerian mother, writes haikus and reads Shakespeare, but regularly throws tantrums and avoids social interaction both at school and at home. The story of a troubled eight-year-old haunted and ultimately possessed by family secrets, this spooky debut novel from a 20-year-old Nigerian-born Cambridge student is sure to garner attention for its precocity and literary self-consciousness.

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The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi