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
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 2025
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.
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
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.
— Meghan Racklin, 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.
— Sofia Samatar, The Baffler
Serre’s work often rejects traditional conventions of the novel and demands more of its readers. In A Leopard Skin Hat, we follow a character known only as the Narrator, who Serre deftly separates from the narrator of the book, in a detached yet intimate portrayal of a lifelong friendship.
— Liz Schroeder, New Letters
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, ALeopard-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.
