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English
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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.
An immersive, hallucinatory read set in a crumbling old cinema where the real and the imagined collide in fantastical fashion.
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.
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.
Fluent and transporting... utterly enthralling
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.
What commends Children of Paradise... is the deft hand of an auteur at work.
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.
Grudova understands that the best writing has to pull off the hardest aesthetic trick - it has to be both memorable and fleeting.
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.
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.
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.
Brilliant in the way only Camilla Grudova can be brilliant. Capitalism, cinema, strangeness - everything you hope it will be.
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.
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.
An enjoyable satire on film culture and labour exploitation
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.