TOP DOLL

(Paperback)

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The complex, lyrical, hilarious and completely wonderful debut novel by award-winning poet and campaigner, Karen McCarthy Woolf.

An entitled porcelain doll struggles to cope with reality when her lifetime companion, a reclusive billionaire heiress, is admitted to hospital. This is their story.

Top Doll is a verse novel and a highly unreliable, semi-fictional biography of the eccentric American billionaire heiress Huguette Clarke, who died in New York's Beth Israel Hospital, age 106, not having been outside for more than 50 years. She trusted no one and spoke to few, except for accountant, her lawyer and her vast collection of dolls, who together narrate this miniature epic. It is both deadly serious and incredibly funny in its exploration of the emotional influence dolls exert on the human psyche and how this embodies family power dynamics and the politics of race, wealth and desire.

Author Bio

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.