Sex, death, flowers-rivers, seas, sleep. They all have beds. This was my very first thought.
The first part of this story is told from the perspective of a sex doll.
The second from the perspective of the man who owns her.
Peter Leggatt's debut novel opens with the thoughts of a sex doll as she comes to consciousness inside her crate, about to be delivered to the apartment of her owner, J. There, J opens her. What ensues is a very modern love affair, teetering between tragedy and the darkly comic, and written in prose of hallucinatory beauty. At a moment when debate over gender and identity is increasingly fraught Doll affords a provocative new perspective on love and objectification.
Doll is an astonishing piece of writing. Its ingenuity, and intelligence, and strangeness, and indeed beauty, carry for me a Nabokov originality, and that is a high matching indeed. I have absolutely no doubt this is best seller material. - Tim Waterstone, novelist and founder of Waterstones