Gingerbread

Gingerbread is a novel by the British writer Helen Oyeyemi, published in 2019. It takes the place that gingerbread occupies in old stories and builds a family history around it.

Harriet Lee is raising her daughter Perdita in London, in a seventh-floor flat they share with a certain amount of surprisingly talkative plant life, and the two of them are not quite the unremarkable household they appear to be. The recipe they keep is the inheritance, and it goes back to Druh stana, the country Harriet came from, which may or may not exist.

The person who appreciated the gingerbread most was Gretel Kercheval, Harriet's friend from childhood and a woman who seems to have had a hand in every good and bad thing that has happened to Harriet since they met. When Perdita becomes a teenager she sets out to find her mother's long-lost friend, and the attempt produces a new telling of Harriet's life, following the family through ambition, jealousy, money, property and the grudges that keep them together.