The Doll's Alphabet

Surreal, ambitious and exquisitely conceived, The Doll’s Alphabet is a collection of stories in the tradition of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies – many images recur in stories that are in turn child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark. In ‘Unstitching’, a feminist revolution takes place. In ‘Waxy’, a factory worker fights to keep hold of her Man in a society where it is frowned upon to be Manless. In ‘Agata’s Machine’, two schoolgirls conjure a Pierrot and an angel in a dank attic room. In ‘Notes from a Spider’, a half-man, half-spider finds love in a great European city. By constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has come up with a method for storytelling that is highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting.

‘That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams.’
— Nick Lezard, Guardian

‘If fairytales could dream, this nightmarish collection is what you might end up with. Grudova’s closest living counterpart could be Ben Marcus, with whom she shares a heavy debt to Kafka … But the atmosphere of her fantastical, semi-dystopian settings is so unique and persuasive that the day after finishing the book, I awoke from a dream to realize that it had taken place in Grudova’s universe…. The author’s surreal humour, often delivered via deadpan dream logic, recalls the startling short stories of Leonora Carrington. Both Carrington and Grudova excel at a certain well-placed, pedestrian literalism that works deliciously against the magical elements in their fiction.’
— Claire Lowdon, Times Literary Supplement

‘The comic grotesqueries that emerge from this collection owe a bit to Dickens, Kafka and Heinrich Hoffmann’s “Der Struwwelpeter,” but their total effect is delightfully unclassifiable…. The Doll’s Alphabet is clearly a revisionist undertaking. It unsettles assumptions about motherhood and marriage. But it also separates itself from its feminist predecessors. The world it inhabits – droll, inexplicable and even beautiful in its slovenly fashion – is unlike any other I’ve encountered.’
— Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

‘This doll’s eye view is a total delight and surveys a world awash with shadowy wit and exquisite collisions of beauty and the grotesque.’
— Helen Oyeyemi, author of Boy, Snow, Bird

‘A remarkable collection akin to a cabinet of infinite curiosities or a hall of mirrors, The Doll’s Alphabet disgusts and delights in equal measure.’
— Dana Hansen, Chicago Review of Books