White Is for Witching

The Silver family runs a bed and breakfast in Dover — the English port where the ferries arrive from France, where asylum seekers come, where refugees land. The house has opinions about who belongs inside it and who doesn't, and those opinions have been accumulating across generations. Miranda Silver is seventeen, grieving her dead mother, developing an eating disorder, falling in love with her female housemate, and beginning to understand that the house is speaking to her — that it has always spoken to the Silver women, that what it is saying is very old and very English and directed specifically at the people arriving on the boats outside. Oyeyemi, a British-Nigerian author, uses the haunted house to make an argument about British racism and xenophobia that British literary fiction cannot make directly: that England's hostility to those who arrive from elsewhere is a haunting, a colonial inheritance transmitted through domesticity itself, through the very idea of the English home as a place that belongs to some people and not others. Formally strange, emotionally devastating, and politically precise.