A Leopard-Skin Hat

by Anne Serre, Mark Hutchinson (Translator)

Overview

A quintessential early novel about an intense friendship, by the winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle. 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

A Leopard-Skin Hat may be the French writer 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. 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. Anne 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, written in Anne Serre’s signature style.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811234511
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Pages:	122
Product dimensions:	4.30(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

The author of fourteen novels and short story books, Anne Serre was born in 1960. Her work has been acclaimed here as “hypnotic, enchanting” (Publishers Weekly), “tight and fabulist” (Full Stop), and ”strange and beguiling” (Kirkus).

Among Mark Hutchinson’s many translations are René Char’s Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance and The Inventors and Other Poems.

Editorial Reviews

07/24/2023

Serre’s searching, poignant latest (after The Beginners) depicts the complex relationship between a man called the Narrator and a woman named Fanny, who remains inscrutable to the Narrator after her death at age 43. The Narrator and Fanny meet and become close friends in childhood, and as adults readers see them traveling to the countryside, going on walks, and playing ludo in the middle of the night. The Narrator remembers small details about Fanny, like how cautiously she changed gears when driving, and the fact that her big toe was “conspicuously longer than the next.” But Fanny is defined by “an absence”: the Narrator describes her as “at once there and not there.” And though he “talked to rouse her, to keep her alive and in the real world, to bring her round from her dreams,” the Narrator’s efforts, ultimately, are for naught. Serre’s novel memorably evokes the slippery nature of Fanny’s character in its snapshot-like structure: rather than a more conventional and chronological arc, the story progresses along the winding routes of the Narrator’s ruminations. Readers will be moved by this probing story about the unknowability of others. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Genuinely original—and, often, very quietly so."

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

"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

"Wry, unconventional."

The New Yorker

"Anne Serre’s short novel is the deeply romantic telling of a platonic love story between the narrator and his complicated childhood friend, Fanny; a story so beautifully realised—and translated so sensitively by Mark Hutchinson—that the pair become part of the life of the reader. A perfectly balanced book, slender in size but bearing significant weight all the way through, A Leopard-Skin Hat is testament to the ways in which we continue to hold the people we love in our memories, with respect and dignity, after they die."

jury of the 2025 International Booker Prize

"Putting down one of Anne Serre’s books is like coming up for air."

London Review of Books - Lucie Elven

"Exuberantly anti-realist and avowedly fictional...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."

The Brooklyn Rail - Meghan Racklin

"Wry, unconventional."

The New Yorker