Synopsis: Andrew Garvie is (a dwarf) living in London who enjoys making dolls. He answers a personal ad in his collectors magazine and begins a snail-mail relationship with Bramber Winters, a woman who lives in a mental institution across the country. Upon realising he’s in love with her, Andrew sets out on a mission to meet her in person and on his journey reads his way though a collection of short stories by Ewa Chaplin.

I ended up warming to this book a lot more than I thought I would. I enjoyed the Gothic vibe it had working for it and the sense of mystery it created.

Let’s talk about the structure. The story of Andrew and his trip to visit Bramber acts as a frame narrative, within which short stories are interspersed. As well as this, the letters Bramber writes are scattered throughout the storying giving you insight to her character and story. If you’re a fan of short stories, then this will probably work for you, though I can imagine some readers might wish for a deeper connection to the main storyline. I personally quite liked this structure. However, to be honest, I didn’t really care about what happened to Andrew that much and found the dark little stories exciting in comparison.

The ending felt a bit anticlimactic to me. Perhaps because of all the recurring themes in the stories Andrew reads (damaged hands, dwarfism, child prodigy), I kind of expected them to lead towards something. There seemed to be numerous connections between the stories and Andrew’s situation with Bramber… but why? What were they hinting at? Mind you, it’s possible my confusion by this is due to my own failure to put the pieces together.

I liked the dark and twisty feel to the short stories. Andrew reads them from a book, which I would probably be looking for in Waterstones right now if I didn’t know it was fictional. There are no fairytale-esque happy endings or predictable character arcs. They were intriguing and well written and after a little while I found myself looking forward to the next one. To an extent, I do like how things are never explained fully. We never receive a conclusive answer about what is fiction and what is reality. It leaves you asking questions. Keeping this in mind, I still wish I had some closure at the end.

Overall, it was a good read but not one of my absolute favourites. It took a while to get through (a book of this size would usually take me anywhere from a few days to a week, but I ended up reading this for almost a month). I just didn’t feel overly invested in the story, but kept coming back to it anyway out of a mixture of commitment and intrigue. I’d recommend it to lovers of short stories and dark supernatural fiction.

As much as I tried with this book, I couldn’t get to grips with it. Spurred on by plenty of 5* reviews on goodreads, I kept trying but ultimately the ever changing narrative just put me off from enjoying it. Thank you for the opportunity to read it and it is a wonderful book if it’s your ‘thing’. It just isn’t for me.

When I first heard about this book, I was expecting something enchanting, akin to The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale or The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and maybe a dash of The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton.

Maybe there’s more of that later on in the book, but I wouldn’t know. I found the opening chapters to be dull and uninviting, and the interjecting stories within the story bothered me, so I’ve decided to DNF it. Apologies but it wasn’t for me.

The only takeaway I have is an overwhelming nostalgia for the lost art of letter writing.

Thank you to Nina Allen, Quercus, and NetGalley for an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was Avery beautiful told story, my first of Nina Allen and now I’ll need to get my hands on her other book. A very rich and poetic tale beautifully set. All the characters compliment each other perfectly, and it was beautifully magical story. Loved it x

I think this book will be visually breathtaking once published! The cover is absolutely captivating, and I adore the illustrations throughout the book!
In this beautifully crafted tale we follow Andrew a Little boy who instantly falls in love with a doll Marina, from this point on his love for dolls grows with him, he eventually become a doll maker.
Once grown he makes contact with a fellow doll lover via a doll magazine advert, and two become ‘pen pals’. He finds that she loves doll made by Ewa Chaplin, something which he doesn’t connect with. After more than a year of correspondence he decides to plan a trip to meet Bramber. On his way he plans to visit different places along the way.
He is also curious to understand the connection Bramber has with Chaplins dolls. As Chaplin also writes book he buy her modern fairy tails to read on his journey. The content of this book is beautifully entwined throughout our main story, bringing hidden depth to the book, as they mirror the lives of the main protagonists.
This is a very different layout for a book, well worth sticking through! Very cleverly told, I will be buying a copy of this in release! Thank you to Netgalley, Quercus Books and Nina for the ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Whilst providing a challenging structure, Nina Allan writes a wonder of a luminous novel littered with dollmakers throughout. It is complex, magical, multilayered, and interspersed with the dark tales providing the reader with stories within the main story that fray and blur the edges of reality. I came close to giving up at the beginning but was richly rewarded as my persistence began to pay off as I got caught up in the atmospheric, magical and deeply unsettling storytelling that whispers of obsession, of dollmakers and love. Whilst set in modern times, it gives off whiffs of the Victorian era and strong elements of the gothic. Short in stature, Andrew Garvie is a dollmaker who finds himself engaged in a burgeoning relationship with Bramber Winters in a mental institution in Bodmin Moor, developed through the letters they exchange.

Like a contemporary knight in shining armour, Andrew embarks on a quest for Bramber, convinced by the strength of his inner feelings for her and what he has learned about her, irrespective of views contrary to his. On his journey, he engages with the chilling and eerie fairytales written by the Polish writer, Ewa Chaplin, with their elements of horror. They strangely echo the unfulfilled and traumatic past and lives of Andrew and Bramber. This is a novel of being different from others, of identity, feeling comfortable in one's skin, of learning to live again, rising above the fractured and fragmented past experiences. Nina Allan gives us twisted and challenging storytelling, not linear in its structure, embracing the bizarre and the odd with the magical, and weaving the threads in the book with true expertise. I adored her stellar characterisation and the beautiful, lyrical and richly descriptive prose. This may not be a book for everyone, especially as it does not seek to provide all the answers, but it works exceptionally well for me. I found it both enthralling and enchanting. Many thanks to Quercus for an ARC.

This is probably a book you either love or hate, since it's definitely off the beaten path and takes a bit of getting used to. I highly recommend perseverance!

Ever since childhood, Andrew has been fascinated with dolls. Later in life he becomes a collector and dollmaker himself. Through an ad in a collector's magazine he gets in touch with Bramber, who is looking for information on Ewa, a dollmaker from the past. They start a snailmail correspondence in which we get to know their characters and surroundings. The writing is easy accessible and moves at a good pace.
Ewa, the dollmaker, is also the author of some short stories, which Bramber gifts Andrew. These stories are woven into our main story. This mixing of book, letters and stories can be quite confusing in the beginning, but once you get their connection, the magic starts to appear.

Well over a year into their correspondence, Andrew decides to visit Bramber. He doesn't announce his plan, but instead travels through England stopping at places that have special meaning to him. A fascinating trip filled with delightful artistry and quirky characters.
Throughout the journey Andrew and Bramber keep writing, Ewa keeps telling her stories. All characters compliment each other. Gotta love serendipity!
The conclusion of the story is simply wonderful, as true magic should be.

The Dollmaker grabbed me and wouldn't let go and I loved every minute of it!

Thank you Netgalley and Quercus Books / riverrun for the ARC.

A wonderful and magical novel, brilliantly crafted. Shades of Sarah Perry's "Melmoth" - which I enjoyed, but this is much better. The blurb and some reviews make this sound like it could be one of those quirky love stories about two misfits finding one another, but it is much more nuanced and also much darker than that. The twisted short stories that appear throughout the book add an extra dimension to the plot.

Sure to be one of the biggest books of the year. I would recommend this to readers of literary, horror and science fiction rather than mainstream commercial fiction, as it is a tricky and intellectual novel that needs to be read at several different levels.

The Dollmaker is a love story.

It is it the story of Andrew and Bramber, told gradually through Bramber’s letters to Andrew. They build a slow, strange and dreadful picture of her life in the institution and the two of them become closer.

Meanwhile, on his travels, Andrew is reading the short stories of Ewa Chaplin, another doll maker and writer, he finds her stories as bewitching as her dolls.

The story does jump at times between the two tales, but this really adds to the atmosphere and the odd flow to the story.

I felt while this is a love story, it’s all about our differences and how we should embrace this and just be ourselves and try not to pass judgement on others. There is a little sci-fi /fantasy feel here too, which adds to the marvellous atmosphere.

This is a wonderful, original and unique tale and I can thoroughly recommend it.....book clubs will love it too.

I would like to thank the Author/the Publishers/NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book for free in exchange for a fair and honest review

I have mixed feelings about The Dollmaker by Nina Allan. This is a story, with lots of little stories entwined into it. It is well written and lots of you will like it but, I just thought what was the point of it? This book I thought was about a Dollmaker and there were some parts about it. It was also about two pen pals Andrew Garvie and Bramber Winters, who write to each other their innermost thoughts even though they have never met each other. Once I got into a short story and excited to see how the story would pan out, it would completely change to something completely different. For me I like a book to flow nicely, not have to work at it all the way through. Sorry this wasn’t for me.
Thank you Quercus books and NetGalley for a copy of this book.

The switching storylines failed to hold my interest although the writing itself is very accomplished. I think it just wasn't my kind of story telling/genre and I didn't get to the end.

After falling in love with Nina Allan’s work over the past year, The Dollmaker was undoubtedly my most anticipated book of 2019. You might think I’d have been eager to start reading the second I got my hands on a copy, but actually I was quite nervous about starting it. What if it didn’t live up to my sky-high expectations? What if it was just good rather than wonderful and perfect? I needn’t have worried. This is indeed a wonderful novel, and though I know it’s a bit silly to use the word ‘perfect’, it’s difficult to see what could possibly be done to improve it.

Like much of Allan’s work, The Dollmaker is a narrative made up of stories within stories and worlds within worlds. The framing narrative is about Andrew Garvie, who may be the title character, or may not: he is one of several dollmakers in the book. He has had a largely lonely existence, characterised by unrequited love and a single, exploitative, sexual relationship. A passion and talent for dollmaking have given his life meaning, but have not fully erased a pervasive sense of emptiness.

This begins to change when he connects with Bramber Winters, who has placed a magazine advertisement looking for a penpal. Over the course of a year of correspondence, Andrew comes to believe he has fallen in love with Bramber. But they have never met in person – she lives hundreds of miles away in a residential home named West Edge House. The exact reason for her apparent confinement there is shrouded in mystery. Having developed the belief that the two of them are ‘destined to be together’, Andrew sets off to visit Bramber, and against the advice of his best friend Clarence, he can’t help but see his journey as both a romantic quest and a rescue mission.

In a post on her blog, Allan described her book Stardust not as a short story collection but as ‘a fractured novel’. The Dollmaker might be said to fit that description too. Though Andrew’s narrative spans the whole book, it is interrupted by Bramber’s letters as well as macabre short stories ostensibly written by Ewa Chaplin – another of The Dollmaker’s dollmakers. Andrew is reading these stories not because they particularly interest him personally but because Bramber is a great admirer of Chaplin. Yet as he reads, he begins to find they have strange similarities to some experiences of his own. These uncanny parallels add a frisson of strangeness to the plot, betraying its underlying darkness.

Reading Nina Allan, for me, is like putting on a dress made of the finest silk, or eating a box of exquisite handmade chocolates. You understand you can’t have that experience all the time, but when you do, you know that a) you’re in the hands of an expert and b) it is something to be savoured. She is a consummate master of the short story, perhaps the best currently working, so of course ‘Ewa Chaplin’s’ tales – five in total – are an entire pleasure in themselves. The perfectly formed ‘Amber Furness’ and the pitch-black, erotically charged ‘Happenstance’ have particularly stuck with me. I’m not going to do a deep dive into all the intertextual references, because... that isn’t going to be interesting to most people reading this, but I was quietly thrilled by the threads connecting The Dollmaker to the universe of Allan’s fiction, for example Anders Tessmond’s resemblance to the clockmaker at the centre of The Silver Wind.

The tagline sums up The Dollmaker as ‘a love story about becoming real’, and it’s remarkable how accurate that is. It feels as though Andrew and Bramber are being written into existence – and, as the reader turns the pages, read into existence. Chaplin’s stories, such eerie mirrors of the protagonists’ lives, are as much a part of this process as Andrew’s monologue and Bramber’s letters. The Dollmaker is the sort of novel that speaks to the power of fiction and the possibilities it contains: I couldn’t shake the thought that my imagination was playing an active role in shaping the narrative.

It’s only February, but I already know I won’t read a better book this year. And I’m fine with that, because The Dollmaker is worth it. Needless to say, every character is beautifully drawn and every moment feels both authentic and magical; this novel is an enchanted castle of stories upon stories, a dizzying labyrinth. I wanted to go on reading it, and living in its world, forever.

I don't know how I feel about this book. I could not really warm to the characters. I thought that the Ewa Chaplin stories made the flow of the book disjointed. I felt it interrupted my attempts to get into the story between Andrew and Bramber. Maybe if those stories had not been as long I would have enjoyed the book more.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

DNF at 23%. The pacing was a little bit odd for me and while I really enjoyed the fairytale-esque story interludes, the main plot line dragged a bit for me and the scene of sexual assault early in the book, brief though it was, did put me off. I love the premise and the writing of the story parts was wonderful, and I do believe other people will very much enjoy this book, it just wasn't for me!

The Dollmaker - a mesmerising page-turner

It’s a testimony to this compelling novel that the second I reached the conclusion, I turned back to the beginning and started reading it all over again.

Andrew makes dolls, Bramber loves dolls and their mutual obsession prompts Andrew to make the journey from London to the south west to rescue her, like a knight of old. The three strands of the novel – Andrew’s narrative, firmly rooted in reality, Bramber’s letters from West End House, a mental asylum in all but name, and the short stories of Polish émigré Ewa Chaplin – are woven together like a lustrous plait on one of the dolls that Andrew creates.

And, oh, what a force these dolls are. At once innocent as a child but also, looked at in a different light, eldritch – even creepy. Likewise, there’s a running theme of dwarfism. Andrew is technically a midget and, by an uncanny coincidence, dwarves abound in the pages of Chaplin’s stories.

Andrew’s quest has a timeless feel about it. Although the novel’s setting must be contemporary, as it refers to computers and mobiles, Andrew plots his journey using gazetteers, almanacs and railway timetables. His almost pedestrian account (he gives a TripAdvisor style review of my home town of Reading!) grounds the book so firmly that the more fantastic elements seem perfectly credible – an old authorial trick that works especially well here.

I was lucky to receive the text on Kindle through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review, and I can honestly say that I’m sure this will be my Book of 2019!

Just occasionally I did lose track of the characters within the three story strands; not surprisingly as the characters in Chaplin’s stories are often echoed in Bramber and Andrew’s real lives. I wonder whether reading the story in ‘tree book’ form, with clearer physical demarcation between sections, might help here.

This book started off really strong, but completely failed to hold my attention. The way it flipped from the main plotline to chapters from a fictional book just kind of threw me. It made the prose choppy and clumsy. I didn't like it at all

What a strange and wonderful book, so very different to anything I’ve ever read.

The story explores the letters between Andrew Garvie and Bramber Winters, who come to know each other through their mutual interest in dolls. Bramber is researching the life of Ewa Chaplin, who was both a dollmaker and writer of macabre fairy-tale type stories. On his way to meet Bramber in the one-time mental institution in which she lives, Andrew reads his way through Ewa’s stories, in the company of a doll he steals.

Are the dolls, the dwarves, the disfigured, and all the other inhabitants of the Chaplin stories playing out the the lives of Andrew and Bramber, or the other way around? The disconcerting mirrorings of the stories in the real-life narrative is clever and creepy. I loved this.

If there was one word to sum up this book it would have to be 'strange'. I'm just not entirely sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I started it with high hopes but it just got a little bizarre for my liking. I really didn't enjoy having the short stories which just confused me and like others had me wondering if I had a bad copy.

It's not that I think it's a bad book but I just don't know if it's a good one either.

I have a personal dislike of stories within stories, and herein, there were lots. I found them quite jarring, and didn’t feel as though they added much to the main story, which would have been easier to get a feel for were it not for all the interjections!

What made this book stand out for me is its unusual structure. What might have been a love story of fairly limited scope - two people, personally challenged in different ways, corresponding over a shared love of antique dolls and doll-making, followed by Andrew’s slow journey across England to meet up in person - is enhanced by a series of stories within the story. These are the work of a fictional Polish dollmaker of the mid-20th century and uncannily reflect events in Andrew’s own life, underscoring the difficulties he experienced in his early years. I found myself racing through the more modern day story of Andrew and Bramber’s friendship to get to the next of Ewa Chaplin’s stories - so much more intriguing and featuring some really interesting characters, I’d have been glad if there had been more of them. Not at all heavy-going and all rounded off nicely (and not too neatly), I’d be happy to recommend this novel and, on the strength of this one, am tempted to check out Nina Allan’s back catalogue.