The magic toyshop

The Magic Toyshop is a novel by the English writer Angela Carter, published in 1967 and the second of her books.

Melanie is fifteen and has been discovering what she is, and the novel opens with her alone in the house in the dress, which is the last private thing that happens to her. Uncle Philip's shop has a workshop behind it, and its rooms, its smells and the puppets he keeps are described with the detail of somewhere real. Aunt Margaret is mute and communicates in notes, and her younger brothers Francie and Finn work in the shop and treat Melanie as the oddity she is. Carter writes the household as a frightening place with comedy inside it, and Melanie's awareness of herself and of the men around her is the subject of the book rather than its decoration.

It is one of the novels that established the author as a writer of gothic and fantastical fiction, and it followed Shadow Dance among her earliest books, where the same interest in fairy tale and household is already visible.