Top Doll

The complex, lyrical, hilarious and completely wonderful debut novel by award-winning poet and campaigner, Karen McCarthy Woolf. An entitled porcelain doll struggles to cope with reality when her lifetime companion, a reclusive billionaire heiress, is admitted to hospital. This is their story. When reclusive and eccentric American billionaire heiress Huguette Clark dies in a hospital room at age 106, she leaves behind three New York apartments, an unlived-in-but-meticulously-upkept mansion, a Monet and an extensive and varied doll collection. Distrustful and having not been outside for over 50 years, Clark spoke to few, bar her accountant, her lawyer and her dolls - and through this highly unreliable, semi-fictional miniature epic, the dolls speak back. As Clark's chorus of dolls weave together the years of her life and her family history in deadly serious yet playful verse, McCarthy Woolf deftly explores the undercurrents of family power dynamics and the politics of race, wealth and desire.