'Two unusual people with a very real love story. 'Mesmerising, richly layered and wholly original - worthy of a modern Grimm.' Andrew Caldecott, author of Rotherweird ' literary sensibility fuses the fantastic and the mundane to great effect.' Guardian The novel itself is like a babushka doll, slowly uncovering stories within stories and it's absolutely spellbinding.’ Irish Independent A solitary character, Andrew answers a personal ad in a dollmakers' magazine and later becomes consumed. ‘ The Dollmaker by Nina Allan is narrated by dollmaker and collector Andrew Garvie, born with proportionate dwarfism. 'Amazing experiments are still possible with the form of the novel! I was deeply impressed by the complexity of this elegant, beautiful and subtly scary book.' Daniel Kehlmann This is a masterful and multi-layered haunted toy shop of a novel, but who exactly is playing with who?' Tony White 'As uncanny and disquieting as a Hans Bellmer sculpture, yet rooted – like all of Nina Allan’s superb novels – in a minutely observed everyday reality that feels almost too familiar. A fantastic book, revealing a zone of wonder and a world of truth.’ Andrew O’Hagan The world of THE DOLLMAKER is not only one we know, it seems to know us, and readers will lose and find themselves inside Allan’s wonderful creation. ‘In clean, beautiful, agile prose, Nina Allan is able to conjure a recognisable England and a place of deep enchantment. However, it is also a splendid crime narrative of memory, compulsion and the effects of trauma.' Guardian 'Allan is best known for speculative fiction, and there is certainly an element of fantasy in this wonderfully atmospheric novel, which references schizophrenic patricidal artist Richard Dadd as well as folklore and mathematical theory. Her new novel, CONQUEST, is forthcoming from riverrun in 2023. Nina lives and works on the Isle of Bute, together with her partner the writer Christopher Priest.
Her latest novel, THE GOOD NEIGHBOURS, was published by riverrun in March 2021. This was followed by THE DOLLMAKER, published by riverrun in the UK and Other Press in the US. THE RIFT , a tale of two sisters separated as teenagers and reunited in mysterious circumstances twenty years later, was published in July 2017 by Titan Books and won the British Science Fiction Award and The Kitschies Red Tentacle. She also won The Novella Award for THE HARLEQUIN. Her debut novel THE RACE, set in an alternate Britain and dealing with themes of identity and loss, was shortlisted for the Kitschies Red Tentacle and the John W. With her short fiction appearing in many magazines and anthologies, Nina’s story collection THE SILVER WIND , a meditation on time, memory and the nature of reality was awarded the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire (France) in 2014.
She studied German and Russian at Exeter University and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where she completed an MLitt and monograph on madness, death and disease in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov.
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