Eight weird literary romances

Amy Bonnaffons's new novel is The Regrets.

At Lit Hub she tagged eight novels of unlikely love, including:

What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi (2016)

This collection of loosely-linked stories, centered around the concept of locks and keys, contains several whimsical explorations of love at its most surprising. The first story, “Books and Roses,” has a secret garden and library at its center—spaces embodying the private mystery of clandestine love. In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?”, a bookish introvert befriends a haunted puppet in order to pursue her aspiring-puppeteer crush, and finds herself a student at an elite puppetry academy where the lines between human and nonhuman, boy and girl, living and dead, are all intriguingly blurred. Wonderfully queer in every sense of the word, these stories yield dark insights despite their lighthearted conceits: “it’s not always affinity that draws us together (not always, not only)… you can be called to undo the deeds of another.”

Read about another entry on the list.

What is Not Yours is Not Yours is among Sam Reader's six ghost stories to read on a cold Christmas night.

--Marshal Zeringue