Books by Alice Jolly
Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. Her writing has won the PEN/Ackerley Prize, an O. Henry Prize and the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, and been longlisted for the Ondaatje and Rathbones Folio Prizes. She also currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s programme at the University of Oxford.
“In The Matchbox Girl, Alice Jolly offers us an entirely original heroine in Adelheid Brunner, a girl who does not speak but through whose distinctive voice we hear how care for ‘different’ children in the Vienna Children’s Hospital gradually turned into something else. The story is not straightforward. The dilemmas, confusions, twisting of language and pretences necessary to remain human and actually survive in the hell of those times grip the reader, and once you’ve met Adelheid you won’t want to leave her.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction of 2026
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
Interviews with Alice Jolly
Historical Novels About Women Written Out of History, recommended by Alice Jolly
Historical fiction can be both a valid and a valuable mode of examining unrecorded or forgotten figures in history, argues the award-winning novelist Alice Jolly. That is especially the case for women’s history, which is so often thinly documented. Here she highlights five immersive novels that foreground female stories.
Interviews where books by Alice Jolly were recommended
The Best Historical Fiction of 2026, recommended by Katharine Grant
Every year, the judges for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction make a shortlist of the best new historical novels published over the previous twelve months. We spoke to Katharine Grant, prize judge and highly acclaimed author, about the five books that made the 2026 shortlist—from a “haunting and haunted” tale of triple murder on a Scottish island to a “gloriously told” reimagining of real-life intrigue during England’s Wars of the Roses.
