Award-winning British novelist Helen Oyeyemi writes bewitching speculative fiction. Her most recent work is reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel, in which gingerbread plays a significant role. Perdita Lee and her mother Harriet appear to be your average British school girl and hard-working single mom. But all is not as it seems. In addition to their unique living situation, they make a very special gingerbread. Their fellow Londoners are less-than-enthused with the recipe, but it's a specialty from the country of Harriet's youth, an off-the-map land called Druhástrana. Harriet's long-lost childhood friend loved the gingerbread, and Perdita is intent on finding her. This imaginative novel follows Perdita's journey, and the audiobook narration is lovely.

From the publisher: "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. 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."

From the publisher: "A brilliant recasting of the Snow White fairy tale as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African-Americans passing for white. And even as Boy, Snow, and Bird are divided, their estrangement is complicated by an insistent curiosity about one another. In seeking an understanding that is separate from the image each presents to the world, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold."