Leopard-Skin Hat

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.

Review: 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
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 *