Camilla Grudova book launch at Blackwell’s
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
Head to Blackwell’s book store for the Manchester launch of Camilla Grudova’s debut novel, Children Of Paradise, and hear from an acclaimed new author who has been compared to Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Following a reading, Camilla – whose fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta – will be in conversation with host Naomi Frisby of Manchester Literature Festival, and signing copies of the new book.
Children Of Paradise follows Camilla’s critically acclaimed “ambitious and exquisitely conceived” short story collection, The Doll’s Alphabet, which was published by indie Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Described as surreal and uneasy, Children Of Paradise charts the fates of a ragtag group of cinema workers who are spat out by corporate takeover. Since Camilla Grudova works as an usherette in Edinburgh, where she lives, we can only imagine there’s at least some truth in the story, published by Atlantic Books. Here’s the blurb: “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…”
Children Of Paradise follows Camilla’s critically acclaimed “ambitious and exquisitely conceived” short story collection, The Doll’s Alphabet, which was published by indie Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017, who said: “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.”
Nicola Barker, author of Darkmans, said: “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.”
