A Leopard-Skin Hat

Delightful, sad, idiosyncratic … teems with charm, a tribute to the unconventional and a warning of 'the violence done to the tender-hearted'

The Guardian

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

2025 International Booker Prize panel

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

Merve Emre

Seemingly controlled by forces beyond her power, [Fanny] nevertheless emerges in this narrative as a free spirit who chose which of her selves to be

TLS

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

TANK Magazine

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

Publishers Weekly

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

The Brooklyn Rail

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

The Baffler