Mr. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi
Mr. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi
List: $22.00 | Sale: $15.40
Club: $11.00

Mr. Fox

Author: Helen Oyeyemi

Narrator: Carole Boyd

Unabridged: 8 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 07/22/2025


Synopsis

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
One of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists

From the prizewinning young writer of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces comes a brilliant and inventive story of love, lies, and inspiration.

Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding, and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, the celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently.

Mary challenges Mr. Fox to join her in stories of their own devising; and in different times and places, the two of them seek each other, find each other, thwart each other, and try to stay together, even when the roles they inhabit seem to forbid it. Their adventures twist the fairy tale into nine variations, exploding and teasing conventions of genre and romance, and each iteration explores the fears that come with accepting a lifelong bond. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Fox's game. And so Mr. Fox is offered a choice: Will it be a life with the girl of his dreams, or a life with an all-too-real woman who delights him more than he cares to admit?

The extraordinarily gifted Helen Oyeyemi has written a love story like no other.  Mr. Fox is a magical book, endlessly inventive, as witty and charming as it is profound in its truths about how we learn to be with one another.

About The Author

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on January 22, 2013

I enjoyed this because it is so imaginative and clever but I found it hard to finish and didn't feel like I "got" it. This was one of those books that was so enamored with its conceit that at times it loses the reader. Still, this is an audacious, important book well worth reading.......more

Goodreads review by Zanna on October 10, 2015

2 stars 3 stars 4 stars 4.5 stars 5 stars!! Well I liked the opening, but it took me a while to get over the slime of St John, the sleaziness he spread everywhere. There was a voice, a piping, femme-seeming voice struggling with self-confidence that seemed to be Mary's, but nothing was clean, there was t......more

Goodreads review by Rincey on January 28, 2015

I went into this with a slight disadvantage since I don't really know the fairytales/folklore that this book plays with, so I feel like I missed out on a lot of the interesting things that Oyeyemi does here. Also, this is Meta with a capital "M" which I can sometimes enjoy but I think a full novel a......more

Goodreads review by Kelly on May 22, 2016

This was nothing like I expected and I absolutely loved the whole fascinating, strange, perfectly sensible, crazy thing. Review posted in roundup of books on my blog: [URL not allowed]......more

Goodreads review by Nandakishore on October 29, 2019

Statutory Warning: If you like your stories served up in the traditional way with a beginning, middle and end, and with characters behaving like rational human beings in conventional settings, then Helen Oyeyemi is definitely not for you. Mr. St John Fox, the writer, has an unusual visitor one day -......more


Quotes

"A sly, tender, and elegant novel, graced with a magical charm that makes its wisdom about love and loss all the more captivating to read. Mr. Fox is a novel for those who love stories and who believe in their singular power to alter and heal our fragile souls."
---Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air

"A wonderfully original novel, full of images and turns of phrase so arresting, so vivid and inventive, its pages almost glow with them. Helen Oyeyemi has given us a work of playful charm and serious narrative pleasure."
--Sarah Waters


Awards

  • Hurston/Wright Legacy Award