Author(s): Camilla Grudova

Fiction | Staff Picks

Following Grudova's critically acclaimed collection The Doll's Alphabet, this surreal, discomforting debut novel charts the fates of a ragtag group of cinema workers who are spat out by corporate takeover. Longlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction When Holly applies for a job at the Paradise - one of the city's oldest cinemas, squashed into the ground floor of a block of flats - she thinks it will be like any other shift work. She cleans toilets, sweeps popcorn, avoids the belligerent old owner, Iris, and is ignored by her aloof but tight-knit colleagues who seem as much a part of the building as its fraying carpets and endless dirt. Dreadful, lonely weeks pass while she longs for their approval, a silent voyeur. So when she finally gains the trust of this cryptic band of oddballs, Holly transforms from silent drudge to rebellious insider and gradually she too becomes part of the Paradise - unearthing its secrets, learning its history and haunting its corridors after hours with the other ushers. It is no surprise when violence strikes, tempers change and the group, eyes still affixed to the screen, starts to rapidly go awry...

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Reviewed by Fantine:

A grotesque, sticky ode to the disappearance of independent spaces for art-obsessed outcasts.

A girl begins working in a dilapidated, once-grand cinema with a cult following and an equally cultish roster of staff. Enveloped by the gruelling life of an usher; herding perverts and drunks, cleaning popcorn, jewels and miscellaneous fluids (bodily and other) from between seat cushions, so begin the after-work screenings, the pooling of found treasures and clandestine hookups.

The theatre swallows all who enter, figuratively and perhaps also literally. Horrifyingly unique.