The Matchbox Girl

Lose yourself in this autumn's most captivating historical novel

By: Alice Jolly

Narrated by: Rosina Aichner

Bloomsbury presents The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly, read by Rosina Aichner

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

‘A shimmering masterwork’ Alice Austen
‘An extraordinary novel about resilience’ Amanda Craig
‘A mesmerising tapestry woven across history’ Gina Rippon
‘Gripping and profound. A masterful work of rare complexity that lingers and haunts’ Christine Leunens

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 vividly imagined story told with real drive and heart’ Rachel Seiffert
‘Unique and profoundly human’ Emma Darwin
‘One of the most charismatic and companionable narrators I’ve ever come across’ Toby Litt
‘The sheer brilliance of Alice Jolly’s writing stopped me in my tracks, stole my breath’ Angela Findlay
‘An important, powerful book, so real I couldn’t put it down’ Kathleen Jones

Critic reviews

Ambitious, tragic and timely ... Meticulously researched, this book insists we confront the ­complexity of truth, uncomfortable as that may be. It’s also a fierce celebration of the messy nature of humanity itself

Complex and engaging, moving and sorrowful but also, untimately, uplifting. And in Adelheid we have one of the most mordantly funny and honest voices ever encountered in literature (Tan Twan Eng)

Astonishingly clever and moving (Lucy Mangan)

A book that walks a tightrope between realism and imagination, and creates something spirited and memorable as it does so .... A journey to identify what makes us human and what destroys that humanity ... Adelheid’s joy adds up to a great paean to the humanity that the Nazis wanted to destroy

Compelling, deeply researched … Adelheid is an enchanting creation … as tense as a thriller and profoundly moving

A vividly imagined story told with real drive and heart (Rachel Seiffert)

An ambitious piece of writing … Propulsive … it is Jolly’s great gift to open up to us worlds we might never have known and make us feel that we truly understand them

Asks us to remember the averted gaze of so many ‘ordinary’ Viennese during the Second World War and beyond.

The powerful story of a generation of lost children comes to life in this gripping historical novel set in occupied Vienna

Gripping and profound. A masterful work of rare complexity that lingers and haunts (Christine Leunens)

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 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)