The Doll Princess

The Doll Princess

Summary

Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

It's Manchester, July 1996, the month after the IRA bomb, and the Evening News is carrying reports of two murders. On the front page is a glamorous Egyptian woman, a socialite and heiress to an oil fortune, whose partially clothed body has been found in a basement. In the back pages there is a fifty-word piece on the murder of a young prostitute found dumped on a roadside.

For Henry Bane, fixer, loanshark and legman for one of Manchester's established ganglords, it's the second piece of news that hits hardest. Determined to find out what happened to his childhood sweetheart he searches his bombed city for answers, finding that these two stories belong on the same page, and that Bane's world belongs to others - those willing to profit from guns, human trafficking and a Manchester in decay.

Reviews

  • Tom Benn, Stockport born and bred, is that rare thing. A startlingly new, ridiculously stylish, home-grown voice. Despite more than a casual nod to a rain-sodden Hulme dialect, Benn's debut is so full of energy and sharp one-liners, it will travel far and wide
    Henry Sutton, Daily Mirror

About the author

Tom Benn

Tom Benn was born in 1987, and grew up in Stockport. He is a graduate of the UEA Creative Writing MA and was the recipient of the 2009 Malcolm Bradbury bursary. His first novel, The Doll Princess, was shortlisted for the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize and the Portico Prize, and longlisted for the Crime Writers' Association's John Creasey Dagger. Chamber Music was published in 2013.
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