A Leopard-Skin Hat

The International Booker Prize-shortlisted masterpiece on grief and loss, from one of France's most original writers at work today 
 
A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet. A masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance, it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. 
 
A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the Narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell. 
 
Translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.

This novel attempts to cup the elusive, slippery nature of grief. Although it tackles personal loss and mental illness, there’s a sense in which, with the reader’s engagement, the grief becomes ours. It becomes communal and shared. As we grieve the loss of our collective humanity, this book offers hope and helps us feel less alone in the world

I love Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson, for the rippling unreality of her prose. Reading her is like watching a mirage flicker in and out of focus

Serre's beguiling books usually feel more like Mozart, but A Leopard-Skin Hat suggests Bach’s funeral cantatas: long after you’ve finished the book, it goes on pulling at your heart

Readers will be moved by this probing story about the unknowability of others

The story of Fanny and the Narrator is a story about our impulse to understand one another and about the way in which unknowability is what makes someone interesting; it is about, in fact, the relationship between unknowability and the desire to know, neither existing without the other, as a narrator does not exist without a story nor a story without a narrator… Exuberantly anti-realist and avowedly fictional

In her ability to dip down, over and over, into her secret life, and emerge with a small, sparkling patch of that whole cloth, Serre strikes me as extraordinarily lucky… Serre’s primary subject, as always, is narration, and it’s thanks to this obsession that A Leopard-Skin Hat sidesteps memoir, not only by replacing siblings with friends and adopting a male Narrator but by plunging into the volatile spacetime of writing

Anne Serre (b. 1960) is the author of seventeen works of fiction. Her first novel, Les Gouvernantes (The Governesses) was published in 1992 and praised by La Croix for its ‘remarkable economy of style’. Among her distinctions are a 2008 Cino del Duca Foundation award and the 2020 Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle for her short-story collection Au coeur d’un été tout en or. A Leopard-Skin Hat is the fourth of her books to appear in English. 
 
Mark Hutchinson was born in London in 1957 and lives in Paris. Among his many translations from the French are René Char’s Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance and The Inventors and Other Poems, and Emmanuel Hocquard's The Library at Trieste and The Gardens of Sallust.

A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet. A masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance, it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. 
 
A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the Narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell. 
 
Translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.

Anne Serre

Mark Hutchinson

A novel that is incredibly rich, yet imbued with lightness; its movement not linear, but impressionistic. A pleasure to read, and later, to think about

Virtue and Rosalind is enthralling in the leaps it takes through fashion, friendships, and literary forebears. At once bewildering and intimate, this is a book that feels like a treasured friend. I cannot stop thinking about it

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, author of Food for The Dead

Betting on the Nobel Prize is a risky errand, but Serre feels like an increasingly decent bet . . . She does more in 100 words than most writers do in 10,000. This tale of a woman’s love of art and life marks another success

This book is like an enchanted castle. Speaking of her craft, Jane Austen said she worked on little pieces of ivory with a brush of extreme finesse. Anne Serre must have found that magic brush again at a flea market

With Serre, there is neither autofiction, nor autobiography, nor confession, nor historical novel, only fiction – pure fiction – and fantasy, in the manner of Franz Kafka or Robert Walser, whom she counts among her masters

A tribute to friendship, a stroll among beloved authors, and a poetic work of art in itself – sustained by an irony and wit that never let up

Anne Serre observes life with intelligence and ingenuity, turning everyday facts into a source of delight, often bound up with the unexpected turns in her stories. Her writing is deeply controlled, and her surprising endings give enormous meaning to the whole

It is very rare for lightness to be a literary merit, for it not to rhyme with superficiality. But if we understand the word as Walter Benjamin does when he speaks of the heartbreaking, unshakable, inhuman ‘superficiality’ of Robert Walser’s characters returned from madness, we may come closer to the secret of Anne Serre’s writing. Her playful practice of literature is an art of detachment

Anne Serre is a great writer, and this text is one of her finest

Virtue and Rosalind is where our wildest dreams come true. That popular, but not very brilliant, author who’s winning all the prizes? Our writer-protagonist will bump her off. Uncle Henri who walked off during a family picnic and never came back? Rather than blame him, she admires his will to radically renounce the past for a woman in a red skirt, revisiting the picnic site like sacred ground. 
 
But our heroine has more to accomplish on her present course, which glimmers at every turn with material for new characters, new novels. Central to this are her relationships with other women, who she regards as the finest and most meticulous lacemakers: absorbed in what they’re doing, creating something rather beautiful. They share her love of art – and of keeping an ample distance away from all the rest. After all, our darkest secrets live in the family. 
 
International Booker shortlistee Anne Serre reaffirms herself a master of literary form and innovation. Reading her, we read a hundred books at once. At first we might not recognise ourselves in this dazzling hall of mirrors, but by the end of it, we know just who we are.

Anne Serre

Praise for Virtue and Rosalind

A novel that is incredibly rich, yet imbued with lightness; its movement not linear, but impressionistic. A pleasure to read, and later, to think about

Virtue and Rosalind is enthralling in the leaps it takes through fashion, friendships, and literary forebears. At once bewildering and intimate, this is a book that feels like a treasured friend. I cannot sto ...

Betting on the Nobel Prize is a risky errand, but Serre feels like an increasingly decent bet . . . She does more in 100 words than most writers do in 10,000. This tale of a woman’s love of art and life marks anothe ...

A novel that is incredibly rich, yet imbued with lightness; its movement not linear, but impressionistic. A pleasure to read, and later, to think about

Virtue and Rosalind is enthralling in the leaps it takes through fashion, friendships, and literary forebears. At once bewildering and intimate, this is a book that feels like a treasured friend. I cannot sto ...

Betting on the Nobel Prize is a risky errand, but Serre feels like an increasingly decent bet . . . She does more in 100 words than most writers do in 10,000. This tale of a woman’s love of art and life marks anothe ...

A novel that is incredibly rich, yet imbued with lightness; its movement not linear, but impressionistic. A pleasure to read, and later, to think about

Virtue and Rosalind is enthralling in the leaps it takes through fashion, friendships, and literary forebears. At once bewildering and intimate, this is a book that feels like a treasured friend. I cannot sto ...

Betting on the Nobel Prize is a risky errand, but Serre feels like an increasingly decent bet . . . She does more in 100 words than most writers do in 10,000. This tale of a woman’s love of art and life marks anothe ...

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