The Matchbox Girl

(Paperback)

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Description

From the multi-award-winning author - a beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel telling the story of a young girls battle for survival and search for the truth in occupied Vienna

Adelheid Brunner does not speak. She writes and draws instead and her ambition is to own one thousand matchboxes. Her grandmother cannot make sense of this, but Adelheid will stop at nothing to achieve her dream. She makes herself invisible, hiding in cupboards with her pet rat, Franz Joseph, listening in on conversations she cant fully comprehend.

Then she meets Dr Asperger, a man who lets children play all day and who recognises the importance of matchboxes. He invites Adelheid to come and live at the Vienna paediatric clinic, where she and other children like herself will live under observation.

But the date is 1938 and the place is Vienna a city of political instability, a place of increasing fear and violence. When the Nazis march into the city, a new world is created and difficult choices must be made.

Why are the clinic's children disappearing, and where do they go Adelheid starts to suspect that some of Dr Aspergers games are played for the highest stakes. In order to survive, she must play a game whose rules she cannot yet understand.

Triumphant and tragic, soulful and spirited, The Matchbox Girl is a burningly brilliant book that brings the stories of a generation of lost children into the light.

Reviews

Praise for Alice Jolly: A writer of tremendous humanity * Times Literary Supplement *
A rigorously researched, lyrical tour de force * Guardian *
Beautifully written and brutally honest * Sunday Times *

Author Bio

Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. Her writing has been awarded the PEN/Ackerley Prize, an O Henry Prize and the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, and been longlisted for Ondaatje Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. She teaches on the Creative Writing Masters at Oxford University.
@JollyAlice