The Mannequin Makers A Novel [Paperback]

Excitement is rare in the small town of Marumaru, New Zealand. So when a young Maori man arrives on the morning train one day in 1903announcing the imminent visit of a famous strongmanthe entire town turns out to greet him, save one. Colton Kemp, a department store window-dresser, is at home, watching his beloved wife die in premature childbirth. Tormented by grief, he hatches a plan to make his name and thwart his rival, the silent and gifted Carpenter: over the next sixteen years he will raise his newborn twins in secrecy and isolation, to become human mannequins in the worlds most lifelike window display.

From this moment of calamity emerges a work of masterful storytelling, at once wildly entertaining and formally ambitious. The novel leaps fearlessly from the epistolary to the castaway narrative to the picaresque, as Kemps plot goes awry and as he, his children, and the Carpenter converge in the New Zealand hinterland.

The Mannequin Makers?is an adventure-filled and thoroughly delightful yarn, introducing Craig Cliff, one of international literatures most promising young talents, to American audiences.

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Chapter one

In which Colton Kemps wife dies mid-morning, surrounded by misshapen mannequins

Another wayward gouge stroke, another chunk of skin from his forefinger. This was always the way once the head had been roughed out, and three-quarter-inch gouge and carvers mallet were exchanged for palm tools. Colton Kemp lifted the damaged digit to his mouth before the blood could surface, and held it there, stemming the flow and delaying the curses hed hurl at his latest model. Hed named l£¼