The Magic Toyshop

Angela Carter · 1967 CE · Novel · English · Contemporary

The summer she turns fifteen Melanie puts on her absent mother's wedding dress and walks out into the garden at night, and by autumn both parents are dead and she and her brother and small sister have been moved from a country house to a South London toyshop. Uncle Philip carves puppets, forbids talk at meals, has kept his Irish wife Margaret mute since her wedding day and her two brothers at work in the shop; what he wants from Melanie is a part in the puppet theatre he has built in the basement. Angela Carter's second novel, and the first in which the fairy-tale machinery she became known for is fully assembled.

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