The Coiled Serpent

LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2024

GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023





A little girl throws up Gloria-Jean's teeth after an explosion at the custard factory; Pax, Alexander, and Angelo are hypnotically enthralled by a book that promises them enlightenment if they keep their semen inside their bodies; Victoria is sent to a cursed hotel for ailing girls when her period mysteriously stops. In a damp, putrid spa, the exploitative drudgery of work sparks revolt; in a Margate museum, the new Director curates a venomous garden for public consumption.



In Grudova's unforgettably surreal style, these stories expose the absurdities behind contemporary ideas of



work, Britishness and art-making, to conjure a singular, startling strangeness that proves the deft skill of a writer



at the top of her game.



Camilla Grudova lives in Edinburgh. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta. She is the critically-acclaimed author of The Doll's Alphabet (2017) and Children of Paradise (2022).



Utterly triumphant... I can't remember the last time I read satire of the Great British institutions so crisply rendered, so exquisitely batty... Grudova has an instinct for queasily precise imagery that few can rival... She's a thoroughly sui generis visionary - and, after reading The Coiled Serpent, I'd say one of the most startlingly original writers we've got.



Camilla Grudova's books make other young writers seem meek... It's weird, dark and graphic, but as her new collection proves, it's also funny and poignant and distinctive, so inventive that it makes other writing seem uncourageous.



A prodigious instinct for story... careering majestically between the astonishing and the terrible to create something uniquely gripping.



It's gruesome fare, served with cold precision... One imagines these stories pairing perfectly with the painter Paula Rego's paintings of women subverting fairy tales... The simmering undercurrent of rage... is all too recognisable.



Grudova's stories are dark, creepy and strange, each a little off-kilter in a world where mental anxiety and fleshy reality are twisted into surreal scenarios by her fertile but festering imagination... for those with a penchant for gothictinged body horror, these are the business.



Queen of the grotesque... These stories are not for the faint of heart, and reading them is as sharply satisfying as picking at a scab.



Strange, weird, twisted, sometimes surreal and always absorbing.



Unsettling... refuses to gloss over the grimy reality of years of austerity with Grudova's signature abstract flair.



An excellent second collection of exultantly gross-out tales