Camilla Grudova lives in Edinburgh where she works as an usherette. She holds a degree in Art History and German from McGill University, Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta. Her critically acclaimed debut collection, The Doll's Alphabet, was published in 2017. This is her first novel.
An immersive, hallucinatory read set in a crumbling old cinema
where the real and the imagined collide in fantastical fashion.
*Irenosen Okojie, Judge, Women's Prize for Fiction*
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...
Grudova has created a magnificently spiky commentary on the
detrimental nature of work hierarchies and zero-hours
contracts.
*Guardian*
Fluent and transporting... utterly enthralling
*TLS*
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*
What commends Children of Paradise... is the deft hand of an auteur
at work.
*Financial Times*
Camilla 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*
Grudova understands that the best writing has to pull off the
hardest aesthetic trick - it has to be both memorable and
fleeting.
*Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk*
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, Arena RTE Radio 1*
The Paradise, a festering and dilapidated cinema, is the perfect
ground for Camilla Grudova's filthy, grotesque and exquisitely
kaleidoscopic talent. Peeping under the stained red curtain, we
meet a cast of ramshackle characters: bloody, bejewelled, debauched
and sucking ferociously on cigarette butts - this uniquely
eccentric troop of misfits could only have been drawn by Grudova.
Children of Paradise is a linguistic joy, an ode to a by-gone era
of cinema and, above all, a wonderfully alive carnival of
peculiarity.
*Alice Ash, author of PARADISE BLOCK*
I used to work at an independent cinema that was a lot like the
Paradise - full of sticky floors and strange atmospheres and
rumours of secret screens. Children of Paradise is a haunting love
letter to that work, and to film itself. The world Grudova conjures
here is both delightful and disturbing, textured by the rich
details that make her stories in The Doll's Alphabet so
distinctive: stolen trinkets, brooches and ticket stubs; cocktails
crafted with pickled eggs and maraschino cherries. Intimate and
claustrophobic, Children of Paradise captures all the dark
enchantment that comes with slipping in and out of movie screens
for a living.
*Laura J Maw*
Brilliant in the way only Camilla Grudova can be brilliant.
Capitalism, cinema, strangeness - everything you hope it will
be.
*Heather Parry, author of ORPHEUS BUILDS A GIRL*
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 of BITTERHALL*
A weird and haunting examination of the slow decay of the old ways,
and the sly encroachment of careless, brave new worlds... A wry
cautionary tale for cinema lovers, revealing the rotten core behind
the creative industries, the grubby death knell of artistic
romanticism. It is, in both senses, an entirely revolting work.
*The Skinny*
An enjoyable satire on film culture and labour exploitation
*Literary Review*
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