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 vividly imagined story told with real drive and heart

Rachel Seiffert

Gripping and profound. A masterful work of rare complexity that lingers and haunts

Christine Leunens

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

The sheer brilliance of Alice Jolly's writing stopped me in my tracks, stole my breath. Her extensive research and incisive imagination weave a narrative as rich as it is haunting ... This is a courageous, important, stunning and timely book ... It's the kind of novel that doesn't just illuminate the past, but gently and insistently asks us to re-examine the present - and ourselves

Angela Findlay