A Leopard-Skin Hat

byAnne Serre, Mark Hutchinson (Translator), Alisdair Simpson (Read by)

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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 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

About Anne Serre

Anne Serre (b. 1960) is the author of eighteen works of fiction and a collection of notebooks. Her first novel, The Governesses, was published in 1992. 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. In 2025, A Leopard-Skin Hat was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Virtue and Rosalind, which was nominated for the Prix Médicis among many other prizes, is the fifth of her books to be published in English. Her work regularly appears in publications like Granta and The Paris Review.

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.

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