Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2024
GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
A little girl throws up Gloria-Jean's teeth after an explosion at the custard factory; Pax, Alexander, and Angelo are hypnotically enthralled by a book that promises them enlightenment if they keep their semen inside their bodies; Victoria is sent to a cursed hotel for ailing girls when her period mysteriously stops. In a damp, putrid spa, the exploitative drudgery of work sparks revolt; in a Margate museum, the new Director curates a venomous garden for public consumption.
In Grudova's unforgettably surreal style, these stories expose the absurdities behind contemporary ideas of
work, Britishness and art-making, to conjure a singular, startling strangeness that proves the deft skill of a writer
at the top of her game.
About the Author
Camilla Grudova lives in Edinburgh. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta. She is the critically-acclaimed author of The Doll's Alphabet (2017) and Children of Paradise (2022).
Reviews
Utterly triumphant... I can't remember the last time I read satire of the Great British institutions so crisply rendered, so exquisitely batty... Grudova has an instinct for queasily precise imagery that few can rival... She's a thoroughly sui generis visionary - and, after reading The Coiled Serpent, I'd say one of the most startlingly original writers we've got. -- A K Blakemore * Guardian *
Camilla Grudova's books make other young writers seem meek... It's weird, dark and graphic, but as her new collection proves, it's also funny and poignant and distinctive, so inventive that it makes other writing seem uncourageous. * Sunday Telegraph *
A prodigious instinct for story... careering majestically between the astonishing and the terrible to create something uniquely gripping. * Irish Times *
It's gruesome fare, served with cold precision... One imagines these stories pairing perfectly with the painter Paula Rego's paintings of women subverting fairy tales... The simmering undercurrent of rage... is all too recognisable. * Financial Times *
Grudova's stories are dark, creepy and strange, each a little off-kilter in a world where mental anxiety and fleshy reality are twisted into surreal scenarios by her fertile but festering imagination... for those with a penchant for gothictinged body horror, these are the business. * Daily Mail *
Queen of the grotesque... These stories are not for the faint of heart, and reading them is as sharply satisfying as picking at a scab. * The Skinny *
Strange, weird, twisted, sometimes surreal and always absorbing. * The Bristol Magazine *
Unsettling... refuses to gloss over the grimy reality of years of austerity with Grudova's signature abstract flair. * Big Issue *
An excellent second collection of exultantly gross-out tales * Telegraph Best Fiction Books of 2023 *
Book Information
ISBN 9781838956387
Author Camilla Grudova
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Atlantic Books
Publisher Atlantic Books
