Empty Wigs - Signed Bookplate First Edition

by Meades, Jonathan | Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Published 06/02/2025 by Unbound in the United Kingdom
Hardback | 1008 pages
240 x 159mm | 0g

Signed Bookplate First Edition - Hardback - Publishes February 2nd.

Empty Wigs is Jonathan Meades' first novel in twenty years and is hotly anticipated by fans and critics

For forty years Jonathan Meades has been one of the UK's most recognisable and acerbic cultural critics. The sixty films he made for the BBC (on subjects like architecture, food and twentieth century history) are legendary and have guaranteed him a cult following.

Empty Wigs is a hallucinatory ride through the twentieth century that will cement Jonathan Meades as one of the great literary writers of our age.

It moves from bloody Algiers in 1962 to the Marches in the late nineteenth century, from Lüneburg Heath to suburban southern England. Its characters are damned and doomed. They exert free will so make terrible choices. Their appetites are base. Their lives are without end. They lurch to extremes. From euthanasia to terrorism and political assassination, with secrets and betrayals, great gothic houses and pseudo-scientific experiments,

Empty Wigs is a vast compendium of tales from the jungle of existence which show humankind at its most abject. Many of its stories are bleak, perverse, harrowing. Many are tragically farcical. But the writing is neon-rich, gorgeous and baroque, funny and joyfully offensive. Told through frames within frames, mazes within mazes, colliding narratives and quick changing moods, Empty Wigs is a late modern masterpiece and a return to the novel’s origins.