Empty Wigs

Empty Wigs is Jonathan Meades's magnum opus, a late modernist masterpiece about the terrible things human beings are capable of when they believe in ideology that's bigger than themselves

‘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.

'Loudly immoral, deafeningly well written and indiscriminately offensive, Meades’s novel is a breath of filthy air in a puritanical age' Cosmo Adair, The Times

'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