In her reappropriation of fairy stories, Oyeyemi is risking comparison to Angela Carter, but it would be both foolish and denigrating to say that she is running a similar course. It makes you realise what the short form can do, in the hands of someone who cares only for the rules they feel that apply to them. Even on the fourth reading, its melancholic sci-fi narrative of loss moved me to inconsolable tears. In a collection of such beauty, it feels unfair to single a story out for praise – each is so alive, to do so would be sure to rankle with one of them – but 'presence' is the kind of story you immediately want to press upon people.

Book review: The Smell of Other People's Houses.

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Ultimate Questions by Bryan Magee: A wonderful, wonder-full life.

No Need for Geniuses by Steve Jones: Scientists targeted in France.

India's War by Srinath Ragh: More than a bastion of the British Empire.

Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times by Thomas Piketty, book review.

It is one of many moments when Oyeymi drops your jaw she shouldn't be able to get away with such digressive, scattergun plotting, but her deep understanding of narrative, her pitch-perfect sense of character and tonal variation means every one of these stories lands in places for which the reader simply cannot be prepared. But when its glorious conclusion comes, it feels utterly whole, utterly complete. The opening story, 'books and roses', is emblematic of this: a tale that encompasses so many different relationships, so many lovers, servants, friends and enemies it is difficult to predict where the story is headed, or who, ultimately, is its subject.

In her introduction to Silvina Ocampo's selected stories, Helen Oyeyemi observes that critics and readers of the form demand 'Certain structural assurances… some guarantee that if and when an event or idea throws us off-balance, by the end that balance will be restored, or at the very least the tools for its restoration will be within reach.' It is a demand to which she admirably does not accede in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, a short story collection that revels in its lack of readerly assurance, that luxuriates in the meddlesome and ludic nature of the imagination, and finds unexpected possibilities lurking inside every character and situation.

Helen oyeyemi what is not yours