Book Review: Book is shrouded in mystery and something magical too

From Murder on the Orient Express to From Russia with Love, many authors have brilliantly exploited the potential of this marvellous setting.Peaces is a book about a train journey by Helen Oyeyemi, one of the cleverest, funniest and most engrossing writers around. Hold my calls. Barricade the doors. Get kettle on.

The book tells the story of hypnotist Otto Shin, who’s off on a non-honeymoon honeymoon with his lover Xavier - a long-distance train journey through Europe.

Being an Oyeyemi story, though, things are far from straightforward.The route is shrouded in mystery, and the train is formed of a series of weird and wonderful carriages, from a sauna to a gallery to a library.The Hope Valley line to Manchester Piccadilly, this is not.

It turns out the only other passenger is a lady called Ava Kapoor, a mysterious figure who’ll shortly inherit a vast fortune when she turns 30, if she can prove she’s sane.

As Ava, Otto and Xavier learn more about how each of them really came to be on the train, one strand of the book’s narrative uncovers the forces at work to bring our cast together.

Ultimately, though, this is a book about nothing less than life itself.Each of us gets one train, with its own unique series of carriages and components, going through our own unique landscape, stuck with our fellow passengers, only a few of whom we get to choose.

So much of what makes a good life is in our own perception, what we see and how see it - and Peaces contains insight upon insight on this.

This is a delight of a book, which is entertaining from the very start to the finish.

I’m a bit of an Oyeyemi fan (this is the writer that, when I was going to meet her, my daughter had to give me a stern pep talk...“It’s okay to say ‘I love your writing; it’s not okay to say ‘I love you.’”) and Peaces is up there with the very best of her work.

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