TOP DOLL

Karen McCarthy Woolf was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.She was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. Karen's radio credits include Night Shift, a reworking of Homer's Odyssey for R4 Book of the Week; Miss Birdie's Letter, a music/poetry travelogue for R3 Between the Ears; and a collaborative adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando which was a BBC Drama of the Week. She is currently working at the Promise Institute for International Human Rights Law as a Fulbright Scholar, co-presenting R4's Poetry Please, lecturing in China and collaborating with various techno music producers for events across London. Top Doll is her debut novel.

'If you read one book this year let it be Top Doll.' Malika Booker When reclusive billionaire Huguette Clark dies age 104, she leaves behind a suite of New York apartments, a meticulously kept California mansion, a Monet and her vast collection of antique dolls. Having barely been outside for 50 years, the elusive Clark spoke to few - 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.'Wild, queer and unstoppably inventive . . . McCarthy Woolf possesses a rare, uncanny power in prose and lyric . . . This book is poignantly absurd and unsentimentally tender' Kit Fan'An immersive, playful, multi-voiced time-travelling story. . . beautiful, surprising, painful and yes, humourous. Woolf has written a book that is truly worthy of the term "novel" Raymond Antrobus