Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi has a gift for noticing how life imitates folktales, said Helen Shaw in NYMag.com. Now 36, the Nigerian-born British writer might always be known as the onetime prodigy who sold her first novel, The Icarus Girl, at 18. But she has since written six more novels that mix fairly contemporary settings with the dark magic of oldfashioned bedtime stories. Boy, Snow, Bird reworks “Snow White.” Mr. Fox, from 2011, refashions the story of the serial widower Bluebeard. It was, she says, “my trying to write through the fear of being a woman and the strong possibility of getting murdered.” She sometimes considers herself part fox—drawn to people but favoring solitude. Folktales resonate with her, she says, because of their “richness as source stories about the strangeness of thought and emotion.”

Oyeyemi’s latest book, Peaces, initially seems a departure, said Jen Doll in Publishers Weekly. It’s a train novel, after all, following two men who are traveling by rail on their honeymoon. But Oyeyemi adds a character who might be invisible, and though she had planned for the couple to meet a bad end, some kind of fairy-tale thinking prevented her from following through.

“It was almost as if the characters were just refusing that,” she says. She admits that her initial desire to punish them for being in love was personal. “I had at that point just completely given up on finding anyone,” she says. But letting them off easy may have paid off with a bit of fairy-tale magic: Soon after she finished a book about the power of love to protect against harm, she fell in love herself. “That’s a slightly terrifying thing to me,” she says.