Each month on euradio, in Turning The Page, our team will be interviewing people from the book world.
In the first part of Little by Edward Carey, we explore the remarkable origins of the novel and the early life of its unforgettable heroine. Inspired by the real Marie Grosholtz—later known to the world as Madame Tussaud—Edward Carey reimagines the childhood of a girl born small, fragile, and seemingly insignificant in a French village in 1761.
Through Carey’s vivid, eccentric storytelling, we meet “Little”: a determined child whose life begins in poverty and uncertainty after her father dies in the Seven Years’ War. Travelling with her mother to Berne, she enters the strange household of Dr Philippe Curtius, a physician who creates wax models of diseased organs for medical demonstration. In his candlelit workshop, filled with wax, jars, and fragments of the human body, Little receives an unusual education—one that will shape her future.
This episode looks at how Carey blends historical fact and imaginative fiction to bring Little’s early years to life, tracing the genesis of the novel and the formative experiences that set the stage for the extraordinary journey of the girl who would one day become Madame Tussaud.
