Book Summary and Reviews of A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi

A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi

A New New Me

A Novel

by Helen Oyeyemi

  • Critics' Consensus (3):
  • Published:
  • Aug 2025, 224 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the award-winning, bestselling "literary pied piper" (The New York Times) who brought us Boy, Snow, Bird comes a masterful story that asks: What if the different sides of your personality had trust issues with each other?

New Day, New You!

Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week. There's a Kinga for every day: On Mondays, you can catch Kinga-A deleting food delivery apps. By Friday, Kinga-E is happy to spend the days soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath.

Kingas A–G, perhaps unsurprisingly, live a varied life—between them is a professional matchmaker, a scent-crazed perfumer, and a window cleaner, all with varying degrees of apathy, anger, introversion, and bossiness. At least three of them are Team Toxic.

It's an arrangement that's not without its fair share of admin, grudges, and half-truths. But when Kinga-A discovers a man tied up in their apartment, the Kingas have to reckon with the possibility that one of them might be planning to destroy them all.

How many versions of oneself can one self safely contain?

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"The novel is hard to follow, but it's held together by hypnotic prose and a healthy dose of absurdism. Adventurous readers will enjoy following its twisty path." —Publishers Weekly

"Oyeyemi offers us an existential farce that wrestles with what it means to reconcile all the pieces of yourself, especially when they're in constant disagreement about how best to live a life. There are more questions than answers in this dreamlike novel of dissociation—but that's also part of its thrill." —Kirkus Reviews

This information about A New New Me was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Helen Oyeyemi Author Biography

Photo: © Manchul Kim

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, which won the PEN Open Book Award, along with seven novels, including Peaces, Gingerbread, and Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Link to Helen Oyeyemi's Website

Name Pronunciation
Helen Oyeyemi: ooo-yee-yemi

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