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TOP DOLL

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot 2024
By Karen McCarthy Woolf
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Brief Description
'Extraordinarily inventive, witty, moving and profound.' Bernardine Evaristo If you read one novel this year, let it be Top Doll. This is innovative, exquisitely crafted storytelling at its finest.' Malika Booker When reclusive billionaire Huguette Clark dies at age 104, she leaves behind a suite of... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
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The complex, lyrical, hilarious and completely wonderful debut novel by award-winning poet and campaigner, Karen McCarthy Woolf.

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'Extraordinarily inventive, witty, moving and profound.' Bernardine Evaristo

If you read one novel this year, let it be Top Doll. This is innovative, exquisitely crafted storytelling at its finest.' Malika Booker

When reclusive billionaire Huguette Clark dies at age 104, she leaves behind a suite of New York apartments, a meticulously maintained California mansion, at least one Monet, and her vast collection of antique dolls. Having barely been outside for 50 years, the elusive Clark spoke to fewβ€”in this highly unreliable, semi-fictional miniature epic, the dolls tell all.

Theirs is a tale that takes us from their lavish Park Avenue home back in time to the slave plantations of Virginia and the palaces of Imperial Japan, via the addictive hedonism of 1930s queer LA.

Joyfully irreverent, Top Doll is a story of love, betrayal, Barbies, and ultimately, what it means to be human.

'An astonishing combination of depth, compassion and beauty. A constant series of delicious surprises.' Leone Ross

*

Praise for An Aviary of Small Birds:

'Beautiful, painful, pitch-perfect . . . McCarthy Woolf's tuning fork always rings true.' Guardian

'I loved Karen McCarthy Woolf's technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak.' Maggie Gee, The Observer

Praise for Seasonal Disturbances:

'A strange and stunning collection from a true writer. Vulnerable, hilarious and wise.' Warsan Shire

'An unclassifiable book, revolutionary in its engagement with form, stunning in its intersectional politics, and an extraordinary achievement . . . It will break you, in a good way.' Poetry School Books of the Year 2017

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780349703466

Publisher: John Murray Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 18 January 2024

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Dialogue Books

Contributors:

  • Translated by Priscilla Layne

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 32.0mm

Width: 134.0mm

Height: 214.0mm

Weight: 229g

Pages: 208

Collections

Fiction General Fiction Karen McCarthy Woolf Literary Fiction

About the Author

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is the author of three poetry books and the editor of numerous literary anthologies. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA, Karen was writer in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. Her debut, An Aviary of Small Birds, was an Observer Book of the Year and her second collection, Seasonal Disturbances, which explored nature, the city and the sacred, was a winner in the Laurel Prize for ecological poetry.

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