Peaces

Peaces is a novel by the British writer Helen Oyeyemi, published in 2021. Almost all of it takes place aboard a train, and it was written by an author who has said that she wanted from the outset to write a train book.

The train is called the Lucky Day, and the passengers on it have their own reasons for being there and their own arrangements with one another. The novel follows them through a journey in which the geography and the history of the places they pass are not reliable, and in which the ordinary business of travel, meals, luggage and conversation, is conducted under a set of rules nobody has explained.

Oyeyemi has said that the book is partly in conversation with two novels by the Chinese writer Can Xue and with the work of Carl Jung, and that the writing of Barbara Comyns was an influence on it. The result is a novel that reviewers have described as strange and funny at the same time, and that is less interested in resolving its own puzzles than in the company of the people inside it.