Woman's World, The Back Story
For five years Rawle, Stakhanovite of the scissors and paste, has labored 17 hours a day, seven days a week, assembling 40,000 fragments of text from women's magazines to produce a tale that moves with the pace of a thriller, with as many cliffhanging chapter endings and swerves of story. But there's the added excitement of a typographical rollercoaster: each page features nearly 100 variations as we lurch from sedate Times Roman to the full-blown exclamations of advertisers' fancy capitals.—The Guardian
As an artifact, it's stunning: a blackmailer's letter, a typographical archive, a sly game of chance and a labor of love…. Norma inhabits a world of Rayon, homecrafts and delicious Fray Bentos suppers. But this world is fractured, and its secret is quickly uncovered: imagine Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge rewritten by the creators of Little Britain. By borrowing the vocabulary of an era in which magazines were just inventing the defensive hard-sell of "femininity", Rawle allows Norma's stricken identity a heart-wrenching poignancy, as she spirals out of control. —The Scotsman
A brilliant invention, allowing full lyrical use of the available material, which Rawle gathers and pleats into rhapsodic riffs of garment ecstasy...Woman's World may prove to be metafiction's first bestseller.—The Guardian
What begins as an exquisitely wayward work of art and outright comic masterpiece transforms into a galloping plot of serious literary intent. Woman's World is charming, chilling, sinister, surreal and utterly unforgettable.—The Scotsman
The most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade . . .This book is a work of genius.— The Times
As mad and believable as a dream. Dreadfully funny and oddly unsettling. I think Graham Rawle may be a genius. —Joanna Lumley, yes, of Ab Fab.