Empty Wigs

‘Go to Empty Wigs for prose that never ceases to dazzle, for an extended holiday from contemporary pieties and to disgrace yourself with laughter’ Paul Genders, Literary Review

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

It moves from bloody Algiers in 1962 to the Welsh 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.

'Meades finds the mot juste, the striking reference, to complete every brilliant line. Is it all a bit too much? Reader, it is' Stephen Smith, Observer

'A head-spinning turn that can quicken from high farce into deep seriousness, vaulting across time and space' Chris Harvey, Daily Telegraph

Jonathan Meades' books include three works of fiction – Filthy English, Pompey and The Fowler Family Business – and several collections including Museum Without Walls, which received thirteen nominations as a book of the year in 2012. An Encyclopaedia of Myself was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize and long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014. His first and only cookbook, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen, was published in 2017. Pedro and Ricky Come Again (2021) was the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes (1988). Meades has written and performed in more than sixty highly acclaimed television films on predominantly topographical subjects such as French nationalism, the Baltic and dictators' architecture. He also creates artknacks and treyfs. Treyf means impure, not kosher: it defines his approach to all writing, film and art. He lives in France.