The Matchbox Girl
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:6th Nov '25
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 6th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
From the multi-award-winning author - a beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel telling the story of a young girl’s battle for survival and search for the truth in occupied Vienna
Adelheid Brunner does not speak. She writes and draws instead and her ambition is to own one thousand matchboxes. Her grandmother cannot make sense of this, but Adelheid will stop at nothing to achieve her dream. She makes herself invisible, hiding in cupboards with her pet rat, Franz Joseph, listening in on conversations she can’t fully comprehend.
Then she meets Dr Asperger, a man who lets children play all day and who recognises the importance of matchboxes. He invites Adelheid to come and live at the Vienna paediatric clinic, where she and other children like herself will live under observation.
But the date is 1938 and the place is Vienna – a city of political instability, a place of increasing fear and violence. When the Nazis march into the city, a new world is created and difficult choices must be made.
Why are the clinic's children disappearing, and where do they go? Adelheid starts to suspect that some of Dr Asperger’s games are played for the highest stakes. In order to survive, she must play a game whose rules she cannot yet understand.
Triumphant and tragic, soulful and spirited, The Matchbox Girl is a burningly brilliant book – that brings the stories of a generation of lost children into the light.
A shimmering masterwork written from the perspective of a wholly original heroine ... Adelheid doesn’t speak but her keen and captivating observations reveal a wartime Vienna that is a hall of mirrors: a place of beauty, terror, and deceitful compromises. You will read to the end with the fervent hope that the alchemy of circumstance can save Adelheid from the fate of so many other children like her -- Alice Austen, author of 33 Place Brugmann
A vividly imagined story told with real drive and heart -- Rachel Seiffert
A couple of pages is all it took for me to fall completely under the sway of one of the most charismatic and companionable narrators I’ve ever come across. Adelheid Brunner, The Matchbox Girl, is a charming, anguished and urgent storyteller who whirls us away on an astonishing personal, generational and psychological adventure through the hidden worlds of war-threatened and war-wracked Vienna. This is a very special book -- Toby Litt
Alice Jolly is a writer of originality, passion and insight into the suffering of the most vulnerable ... This will join classics like Plath's The Bell Jar and Toni Morrison's Beloved as an extraordinary novel about resilience -- Amanda Craig
The sheer brilliance of Alice Jolly’s writing stopped me in my tracks, stole my breath. Her extensive research and incisive imagination weave a narrative as rich as it is haunting ... This is a courageous, important, stunning and timely book ... It’s the kind of novel that doesn’t just illuminate the past, but gently and insistently asks us to re-examine the present - and ourselves -- Angela Findlay
In Adelheid Brunner, Alice Jolly has created a unique and profoundly human narrator, through whom to evoke one of the darkest corners of European history. With humour, humanity, compassion and subtlety, The Matchbox Girl tells a compelling story whose implications are as important today as they ever were -- Emma Darwin
A mesmerising tapestry woven across time and place and history ... You will be swept along, breathless to follow so many entwined stories -- Gina Rippon
An important, powerful book, so real I couldn’t put it down ... This is a story that needed to be told. It challenges how we dole out humanity to other human beings, and it asks big questions that need honest answers -- Kathleen Jones
Praise for Alice Jolly: A writer of tremendous humanity * Times Literary Supplement *
A rigorously researched, lyrical tour de force * Guardian *
Beautifully written and brutally honest * Sunday Times *
ISBN: 9781526681034
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
416 pages