At the Paradise, a decaying old cinema in an unnamed city, the distinction between employment, cult membership and haunting, is pretty bloody unclear. 

Holly begins as the newest member of an already tilted ecosystem. Once she acclimatises, to her, the Paradise becomes less workplace than enclosed world, complete with its own histories, rituals, loyalties and filth.

Grudova’s first novel is gleefully rancid. There's toilets full of blood and hair, weird drinks that keep reappearing, stolen clothes, old films, mouldering interiors, rumours of curses and the creeping sense that everyone working there is actually just part of the building. But underneath the grotesquerie is a very good novel about institutions that become identities, cultural labour, precarity and the intimacy of so-called dead-end jobs. 

Grudova’s fiction has the nasty fairy-tale logic of Angela Carter or Leonora Carrington transplanted into service work and late capitalism. It's funny, bodily, claustrophobic and pretty poisonous. Children of Paradise was longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Edition / condition: Atlantic Books, London, 2022. First edition, first printing. Trade paperback. Light shelf and handling wear to covers, with a small mark near the upper edge; internally clean and unmarked. Very good condition.