The emotional story of an intense friendship between the narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A Leopard-Skin Hat may be the French writer Anne Serre’s most moving novel. Anne Serre is a Prix Goncourt winner who has published 17 novels in French, as postmodern sensuous fairy tale. A feminist fantasy, where women satisfy their sexual needs free from society’s ignominy. The first to be translated into English by Mark Hutchinson, 1992’s The Governesses. Hailed in Le Point as a ‘masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance, with a series of short scenes painting 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 (43), A Leopard-Skin is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre’s style, which was Booker-shortlisted tale exploring the ethics of turning real-life tragedy into fiction. Sometimes this jovial, fresh-faced woman in the hat who lived inside her would pop out, a “fully formed individual”.

Fanny B exists inside his friend, the person ostensibly telling the story “ the Narrator” – exists, we are told “inside”, another author who “worries that he might simply be serving a very peculiar writer”.

Serre’s male “Narrator” stands between her and the material. He is a supporter and fascinated admirer of Fanny, with a special tone of longing, enchanted and saddened in a slight remove, which Serre wrings from their dynamic. The book resonances require the key of the family to crack their emotional encryption. The book evokes a dream logic both somnolent and tortuous as the governesses move through home comfort and sexual abandon.

Anne Serre A Leopard-Skin Hat by Lolli Editions/ Penguin Books £11:99, 144 pages.