Author(s): Camilla Grudova

Short Stories

An arresting, discomforting collection from 'one of Britain's best young short story writers' (The Telegraph) that revels in the rotten and festers in the imagination.

 A little girl throws up Gloria-Jean's teeth after an explosion at the custard factory; Pax, Alexander, and Angelo are hypnotically enthralled by a book that promises them enlightenment if they keep their semen inside their bodies; Victoria is sent to a cursed hotel for ailing girls when her period mysteriously stops. In a damp, putrid spa, the exploitative drudgery of work sparks revolt; in a Margate museum, the new Director curates a venomous garden for public consumption.

In Grudova's unforgettably surreal style, these stories expose the absurdities behind contemporary ideas of
work, Britishness and art-making, to conjure a singular, startling strangeness that proves the deft skill of a writer
at the top of her game.

Review: Camilla Grudova's books make other young writers seem meek... It's weird, dark and graphic, but as her new collection proves, it's also funny and poignant and distinctive, so inventive that it makes other writing seem uncourageous. * Sunday Telegraph *
A prodigious instinct for story... careering majestically between the astonishing and the terrible to create something uniquely gripping. * Irish Times *
Grudova's stories are dark, creepy and strange, each a little off-kilter in a world where mental anxiety and fleshy reality are twisted into surreal scenarios by her fertile but festering imagination... for those with a penchant for gothictinged body horror, these are the business. * Daily Mail *
Queen of the grotesque... These stories are not for the faint of heart, and reading them is as sharply satisfying as picking at a scab. * The Skinny *
Strange, weird, twisted, sometimes surreal and always absorbing. * The Bristol Magazine *

Author Biography: Camilla Grudova lives in Edinburgh where she works as a cinema operator and waitress. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta. She is the critically-acclaimed author of The Doll's Alphabet (2017) and Children of Paradise (2022).