Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award One of Granta ’s Best Young British Novelists From the acclaimed author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces There’s something strange about the Silver family house in the closed-off town of Dover, England. Grand and cavernous with hidden passages and buried secrets, it’s been home to four generations of Silver women—Anna, Jennifer, Lily, and now Miranda, who has lived in the house with her twin brother, Eliot, ever since their father converted it to a bed-and-breakfast. The Silver women have always had a strong connection, a pull over one another that reaches across time and space, and when Lily, Miranda’s mother, passes away suddenly while on a trip abroad, Miranda begins suffering strange ailments. An eating disorder starves her. She begins hearing voices. When she brings a friend home, Dover’s hostility toward outsiders physically manifests within the four walls of the Silver house, and the lives of everyone inside are irrevocably changed. At once an unforgettable mystery and a meditation on race, nationality, and family legacies, White is for Witching is a boldly original, terrifying, and elegant novel by a prodigious talent. “[Oyeyemi] makes us glad to suspend disbelief." — The New York Times Book Review “Profoundly chilling . . . a slow-building neo-Gothic that will leave persevering readers breathless.” — The Boston Globe “If you’ve been missing Shirley Jackson all these many years . . . here’s a writer who seems to be a direct heir to that lamented one’s gothic throne.” — The Austin Chronicle “Superbly atmospheric. . . . The dark tones of Poe in her haunting have also the elasticity of Haruki Murakami’s surreal mental landscapes.” — The Independent (UK) “[Oyeyemi’s] technical skill as a novelist is remarkable, her range of reference formidable and her use of language virtuosic.” — The Daily Telegraph (UK)  "Appealing from page one.... Unconventional, intoxicating and deeply disquieting." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Laced with thought-provoking story lines." — Booklist     Helen Oyeyemi is the author of five novels, most recently  White Is for Witching , which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, Mr. Fox , which won a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Boy, Snow, Bird . In 2013, she was named one of  Granta ’s Best Young British Novelists. She lives in Prague. LUC DUFRESNE is not tall. He is pale and the sun fails on his skin. He used to write restaurant reviews, plying a thesaurus for other facets to the words "juicy" and "rich." He met Lily at a magazine Christmas party; a room set up like a chessboard, at its centre a fir tree gravely decorated with white ribbons and jet globes. They were the only people standing by the tree with both hands in their pockets. For hours Lily addressed Luc as "Mike," to see what he had to say about it. He didn't correct her; neither did he seem charmed, puzzled, or annoyed, reactions Lily had had before. When she finally asked him about it, he said, "I didn't think you were doing it on purpose. But then I didn't think you'd made a mistake. I don't know what I thought. I suppose I thought you were calling me Mike because Mike was my name, if you see what I mean." He wooed his wife with peach tarts he'd learnt from his pastry-maker father. The peaches fused into the dough with their skins intact, bittered and sweetened by burnt sugar. He won his wife with modern jazz clouded with cello and xylophone notes. His fingers are ruined by too close and careless contact with heat; the parts that touch each other when the hand is held out straight and flat, the skin there is stretched, speckled and shiny. Lily had never seen such hands. To her they seemed the most wonderful in all the world. Those hands on her, their strong and broken course over her, his thumbs on her hip bones. One night she said to him, "I love you, do you love me?" She said it as lightly as such a thing can be said without it being a joke. Immediately he replied, "Yes I love you, and you are beautiful," pronouncing his words with a hint of impatience because they had been waiting in him a long time. He seems always to be waiting, his long face quiet, a dark glimmer in his heavy-lidded eyes. Waiting for the mix in the pot or the oven to be ready. Waiting for blame (when, at twelve, Miranda's condition became chronic he thought that somehow he was responsible; he'd let her haunt the kitchen too much, licking spoons. He forgot that he had allowed Eliot to do the same.) Waiting, now, for the day Lily died to be over, but for some reason that day will not stop. Meanwhile he has the bed-and-breakfast to run, he has cooking to oversee, peach tarts to make for the guests who know to ask for them. The peach tarts are work he doesn't yet know how to do without feeling Lily. He has baked two batches of them since she died. Twice it was just him and the cook, the Kurdish woman, in the kitchen and he has bowed hi