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SHORTLISTED FOR THE TADEUSZ BRADECKI PRIZE

‘Elegant, decadent, vulgar, clever, enchanting and dark’ Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment

Versailles, 1682: a city of the rich, a living fairy-tale, Louis XIV’s fever dream. It’s a place of opulence, beauty, and power. But strip back the lavish exterior of polite society, and you’ll find a dark undercurrent of sexual intrigue and vicious gossip. Nobody is safe here – no matter how highly born they are.

No one knows this better than Madame Marie d’Aulnoy. Each week, a rogue group of intellectuals gather at her Parisian home to debate, flirt and perform Contes de Fées – fairy tales – that challenge the status quo, at a salon that will change the course of literature forever. But while they weave tales of glass slippers, enchanted beasts and long-haired princesses, a wolf is lurking, who threatens to destroy the members of the salon one by one.

Brilliant and bawdy, romantic and provocative, The Modern Fairies is a dazzling novel inspired by real events, about the delights and dangers of storytelling in dark times.

‘Funny, filthy, dancingly clever … A delectable confection of many-layered pleasures ? I gobbled it all up, Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theatre

‘The sentences sing on the page with wit and intelligence … Reminds the reader of the enduring power of storytelling to transform and even save lives, then and now’ The New York Times

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