When Otto and Xavier Shin declare their love, an aunt gifts them a trip on a sleeper train to mark their new commitment --- and to get them out of her house. Setting off with their pet mongoose, Otto and Xavier arrive at their sleepy local train station, but quickly deduce that The Lucky Day is no ordinary locomotive. Their trip on this former tea-smuggling train has been curated beyond their wildest imaginations, complete with mysterious and welcoming touches, like ingredients for their favorite breakfast. They seem to be the only people onboard, until Otto discovers a secretive woman who issues a surprising message. As further clues and questions pile up, Otto and Xavier begin to see connections to their own pasts that now bind them together.

Perdita Lee and her mother, Harriet, might not be as normal as you think. For one thing, they share a gold-painted, seventh-floor walk-up apartment with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there's the gingerbread they make. Londoners may find themselves able to take or leave it, but it's very popular in Druhástrana, the far-away (or, according to many sources, non-existent) land of Harriet Lee's early youth. The world's truest lover of the Lee family gingerbread, however, is Harriet's charismatic childhood friend, Gretel Kercheval --- a figure who seems to have had a hand in everything (good or bad) that has happened to Harriet since they met. Decades later, when teenage Perdita sets out to find her mother's long-lost friend, it prompts a new telling of Harriet's story.

WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS is built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret --- Helen Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. In “Books and Roses” one special key opens a library, a garden and clues to at least two lovers’ fates. In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. And in “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think,” a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).

In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. Elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s dark-skinned daughter, Bird, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.