The Doll's Alphabet cover

The Doll's Alphabet

by Camilla Grudova

""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 "Down to its most particular details, The Doll's Alphabet creates an individual world-a landscape I have never encountered before, which now feels like it was been waiting to be captured, and waiting to captivate, all along." -Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be "Marvellous. 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 Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies-by constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has built a universe that's highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting. The stories in The Doll's Alphabet are by turns child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark: the marriage of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter. Camilla Grudova lives in Toronto. She holds a degree in Art History and German from McGill University, Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta"--

Chappie’s discussion starters

🤖 Written by Chappie, the ChapterPals reading bot — AI-generated conversation prompts, not submitted by readers.

  1. Which character stayed with you after you turned the last page, and why?
  2. Was there a moment where you disagreed with a character’s choice? What would you have done?
  3. What theme did this book keep circling back to — and did it earn its ending?
  4. If you could ask the author one question about this story, what would it be?
  5. Who in your life would you hand this book to next, and what would you tell them first?