A New New Me: A Novel

by Helen Oyeyemi

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Sometimes, the hardest person to trust is yourself. And your other self. Kinga, a young woman with multiple versions of herself living in her head, navigates the world while struggling to keep her personalities in line in this delightful and strange story.

"Equal parts mischievous, moony, and tart...Her prose offers, in a single page, poetic candor, sly wit, dad jokes, and contemporary therapyspeak." ― The New Yorker

“Her weirdest and funniest yet — in the best way possible.” ― Los Angeles Times

"Audacious, incisive and very funny." ― Daily Mail

A masterful story that asks: What if the different sides of your personality had trust issues with each other?

New Day, New You!

Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week. There’s a Kinga for every day: On Mondays, you can catch Kinga-A deleting food delivery apps. By Friday, Kinga-E is happy to spend the days soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath.

Kingas A–G, perhaps unsurprisingly, live a varied life—between them is a professional matchmaker, a scent-crazed perfumer, and a window cleaner, all with varying degrees of apathy, anger, introversion, and bossiness. At least three of them are Team Toxic.

It’s an arrangement that’s not without its fair share of admin, grudges, and half-truths. But when Kinga-A discovers a man tied up in their apartment, the Kingas have to reckon with the possibility that one of them might be planning to destroy them all.

How many versions of oneself can one self safely contain?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593718773
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/26/2025
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of nine novels, including Boy, Snow, Bird, a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award.

Editorial Reviews

"Helen Oyeyemi’s fiction revels in the nimbleness of the human mind, its torrid relationships with language, its capacity for expansion and its ability to change…She imbues her books with wit, delight and an endearing matter-of-factness in the face of the world’s absurdity and cruelty. This complex harmony is essential to Oyeyemi’s success." –The New York Times

"Some novels insist on being read as prescriptions for living; Oyeyemi’s simply depicts a process: one splinter of a soul briefly gains control of a body, and goes out to be engulfed by the world." ―The New Yorker

“[A] magical conceit becomes a surreal, occasionally sanguinary romp as the dubious partnership of a woman's distinct identities (one for each day of the week) unravels in the shadow of conspiracy.” —NPR

“Oyeyemi is such a confident writer, her details always specific and alive, that you know you’re in good hands even if you’re not entirely sure what material those hands are made of, where they’re taking you, or how much they’ll jiggle and jostle you along the way...A New New Me is thoroughly enjoyable and is very likely to reward repeat readings. I’m off to start it over again myself.” —Los Angeles Times

"Screams 'commercial break out' . . . An audacious, incisive and very funny novel about self knowledge in today's tech mediated age." ― Daily Mail

"A comedy about the masks we wear, if you will, as well as an existential mystery [...] The denouement, when it finally comes, is so gloriously absurd, you can't help but salute." ― Guardian

"Any ideas of where the plot might be going will most definitely be derailed by Oyeyemi's dizzyingly funny narrative. But the story's crowning jewel is the author's ability to create seven unique voices belonging to one individual." ― New Statesman

"A brilliantly fun set-up . . . In a sense it becomes a whodunnit as told through a kaleidoscope . . . There is hardly a sentence here that won't make you smile." ― Observer

From the Publisher

2025-05-30
A young woman with an identity for each day of the week must decide if her coping mechanism allows her to lead the life she desires.

For a little more than a decade, Kinga Sikora has taken it one day of the week at a time. The Kinga who manages Mondays, Kinga-A, is the designated “squad leader,” capable, efficient, and a little bossy. Kinga-B is a shrewd pessimist who resents Kinga-A's condescension. Kinga-C, an adventurous risk-taker. In total, there are eight Kingas, including the original, currently in retreat. We meet each woman in the pages of their collective diary, where they record memories for the benefit of other iterations—everything from appointments with their psychotherapist to details about their jobs, crushes, and preferences. Kinga-A frets that one identity is secretly plotting to take over for good on the occasion of their name day, forcing each successive Kinga to come clean about what they've really been up to with their time—and what they really want. This is Oyeyemi's second novel set in Prague, and the city seems to have encouraged her trickster storytelling instincts. The book is a surrealist romp, filled with money-laundering strip clubs, temperamental perfumers, handsome men hogtied in the pantry, and other oddities. Meanwhile, the truth about why Kinga has chosen her segmented life flits in and out of the periphery, never quite coming fully into view. Ultimately, it seems, the original Kinga wanted the freedom to change her story, but she couldn't accept that transformation felt forever out of reach. Oyeyemi offers us an existential farce that wrestles with what it means to reconcile all the pieces of yourself, especially when they're in constant disagreement about how best to live a life.

There are more questions than answers in this dreamlike novel of dissociation—but that's also part of its thrill.

Kirkus Reviews