Little: A Novel
Edward Carey“The beautifully told (& illustrated!) story of the life of Marie Tussaud, or how tall trees can grow from small seeds. An eccentric atmosphere, a macabre sense of humour, we experience this book with a sense of youthful joy. An unmissable book.” –Olga Tokarczuk
“Little is an amazing achievement. Devote yourself to its first few pages & you will be sentenced to finishing it. I was thrilled not just by the story & the human grotesquerie of it, but by the narrative gallop & the prose, so often quietly startling in the application of a solitary mot juste. A compulsively readable novel, so canny & weird & surfeited with the reality of human capacity & ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens & David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself.” —Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked
In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor & whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow & her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, & the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess & saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, & . . . at the wax museum, heads are what they do.
In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked & Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel—a story of art, class, determination, & how we hold on to what we love.