A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as 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.
Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (in fact, truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas, intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound. He reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure and—adift and lovelorn—she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, literally torn between the two men: How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that’s not named in any poem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why Anna found it so difficult to cross. Anne Serre offers here, in her third book in English, her most direct novel to date. The Beginners is wildly unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd, and entirely unforgettable.
From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre - author of the celebrated Governesses - come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales.
Publishers Weekly Best Books in Fiction 2018 The sensational US debut of a major French writer--an intense, delicious meringue of a novella