Children of Paradise
Camilla Grudova
(Author)
Description
Following Grudova's critically acclaimed collection The Doll's Alphabet, this surreal, discomforting debut novel charts the fates of a ragtag group of cinema workers who are spat out by corporate takeover.
When Holly applies for a job at the Paradise - one of the city's oldest cinemas, squashed into the ground floor of a block of flats - she thinks it will be like any other shift work. She cleans toilets, sweeps popcorn, avoids the belligerent old owner, Iris, and is ignored by her aloof but tight-knit colleagues who seem as much a part of the building as its fraying carpets and endless dirt. Dreadful, lonely weeks pass while she longs for their approval, a silent voyeur.
So when she finally gains the trust of this cryptic band of oddballs, Holly transforms from silent drudge to rebellious insider and gradually she too becomes part of the Paradise - unearthing its secrets, learning its history and haunting its corridors after hours with the other ushers. It is no surprise when violence strikes, tempers change and the group, eyes still affixed to the screen, starts to rapidly go awry...
Product Details
| Publisher | Atlantic Books (UK) |
| Publish Date | October 10, 2023 |
| Pages | 208 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781838956349 |
| Dimensions | 7.6 X 5.0 X 0.8 inches | 0.4 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"Grudova is Angela Carter's natural inheritor. Her style is effortlessly spare and wonderfully seductive. Read her! Love her! She is sincerely strange - a glittering literary gem in a landscape awash with paste and glue and artificial settings." --Nicola Barker, author of Darkmans
"One of Britain's best young short story writers... eerie... festers in glorious style... there's nothing vanilla in the dark of the Paradise, and even when the corporate takeover comes, complete with managerial drone, it all feels smooth and unearthly - an allegory for lost stories, youth and time. - The Telegraph
"There's a strange, tortured beauty to Children of Paradise... A magnificently spiky commentary on the detrimental nature of work hierarchies and zero-hours contracts. - Guardian
"A remarkable and memorable achievement. To combine the gothic, the carnivalesque, the ghastly and the sublime in a relatively slender novel shows considerable talent indeed." - Scotland on Sunday
"It's easy to write what everybody else writes and that's not what Camilla Grudova is doing... We need work like this in the world." --Sinead Gleeson, author, Constellations
"Gloriously disgusting, bloody, alluring - an ode to a vanishing world of filthy, gaudy independent cinemas and the curious souls who work there. One for any fan of their local fleapit. - Helen McClory, author, The Goldblum Variations
"Has already garnered comparisons to Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Leonora Carrington, Ben Marcus, and Franz Kafka. To this list let me add another name: George Orwell." --Harper's Magazineon The Doll's Alphabet
"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 world it inhabits - droll, inexplicable and even beautiful in its slovenly fashion - is unlike any other I've encountered." --Wall Street Journal on The Doll's Alphabet
"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 on The Doll's AlphabetEarn by promoting books
