The author introduces her new novel Peaces, the story of a couple on a mysterious train journey, in an event chaired by Merve Emre.

As the carriages roll along, Otto and Xavier Shin discover that each is more curious and fascinating than the last, becoming embroiled in this strange train and its intrigue.

Who is Ava Kapoor, the sole full-time inhabitant of the train, and what is her relationship to a man named Prem? Are they passengers or prisoners? We discover who orchestrated the journey, hurtling them all into their past for clues. This is a brilliant, wise, strange and, above all, beautiful novel.

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, Oyeyemi was included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Merve Emre is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author and editor of several books, including The Personality Brokers, which was selected by many US and UK publications as one of the best books of 2018 and adapted as the 2021 HBO documentary feature film Persona.

Emre is a 2020 fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She has edited The Annotated Mrs Dalloway, providing an introduction and notes, which is forthcoming in autumn 2021.

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