Dialogue lands experimental verse novel by poet McCarthy Woolf 

Dialogue Books has signed Karen McCarthy Woolf’s debut novel, Top Doll.

Sharmaine Lovegrove, m.d., and Hannah Chukwu, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Cathryn Summerhayes via Curtis Brown. The “playfully satirical” novel will be published 18th January 2024.

The publisher said Top Doll explores “the real and extraordinary life of a reclusive American heiress". The synopsis says: "Huguette Clark died aged 104, leaving a suite of New York apartments, a meticulously upkept California mansion, a Monet and her vast collection of antique dolls. Having barely been outside for 50 years, the elusive Clark spoke to few – in this highly unreliable, semi-fictional miniature epic, the dolls tell all. Theirs is a tale that takes us from their lavish Park Avenue home back in time to the slave plantations of Virginia and the palaces of Imperial Japan via the addictive hedonism of 1930s queer LA."

Dialogue touted the novel as "joyfully irreverent" and "a story of love, betrayal, a host of Barbies and ultimately, what it means to be human".

McCarthy Woolf was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022 and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Los Angeles where she was writer in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections and editor of numerous anthologies. Her radio credits include "Night Shift", a reworking of Homer’s Odyssey for Radio 4 Book of the Week that recasts the eponymous hero as a London Uber driver and a collaborative adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – a BBC Drama of the Week. She has co-presented Radio Four’s Poetry Please, collaborated with musicians, visual artists and choreographers, held residencies in Brazil, the US and UK and appeared at festivals everywhere from China to the Caribbean.

Lovegrove and Chukwu said: “We’ve long admired Karen’s work and her unique ability to tell iconic stories with startling originality. Top Doll explores the psychological impacts of extreme wealth and the fascinating influence dolls exert on the human psyche. It gives us an intoxicating slice of humanity and our secret lives and introduces McCarthy Woolf as a novelist of fiercely charismatic talent.”

McCarthy Woolf added: “It takes verve and imagination to publish any debut novel – not least one that transcends the binaries between biography, fiction, poetry and prose, and which is voiced through multiple narrators, all of whom are dolls. I couldn’t have envisioned a more ideal team to bring this book into being."