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Empty Wigs

By Jonathan Meades

The wait is over. After twenty years, Meades delivers his gargantuan new novel.

Fiction | Almost there

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$45 + shipping

326 pledges

Signed First Edition Hardback

First edition hardback, signed by Jonathan - c.900 pages printed, with coloured endpapers, head & tail bands and silk ribbon marker.

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FEATURED REWARD

$150 + shipping

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La Grande Bouffe (Deuxième Partie)

Supper at a central London restaurant with menu devised by Jonathan, plus signed first edition hardback, ebook and your name in the back of the book. [Date TBC; travel not included]
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Handsome first edition hardback - c.900 pages printed, with coloured endpapers, head & tail bands and silk ribbon marker.

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Two signed first edition copies of Empty Wigs.

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$190 + shipping

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Empty Wigs Book Club

Five signed first editions of Empty Wigs.

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$150 + shipping

15 pledges

La Grande Bouffe

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It has been twenty years since Jonathan Meades last published a novel.

Being Meades, he doesn’t do things by halves. Empty Wigs is at least five books in one: a giddinesss-inducing 900 page masterpiece which will cement his reputation as one of the great literary writers of our age.

Meades’ has been compared to Hogarth, Swift and Rabelais. This massive book shows why. It makes most modern fiction look thin and pusillanimous by comparison.

Empty Wigs is a return to the novel's origins: stories within stories, frames within frames, mazes within mazes, colliding narratives, 'realities' which elide and separate, quick changing moods.

A hallucinatory ride in a gilded vessel through the sickness and labyrinthine squalor of the long twentieth century and its many poisonous antecedents:

Euthanasia... terrorism in the name of god... a great gothic house and the pseudo-scientific experimemts practiced there... genocide in the name of a living god... a celebration of political assassination... Algeria's betrayal... quack doctors who harm not heal... the myths of the Marches... the freezing Elbe... the evils of the hearth... the exhumation of a war criminal to stand posthumous trial ... a heath’s secrets... shapeshifting tricksters... an accident in the Gota Canal... a café near a Bremen park...eugenics... clocktime melting away... the lebensborn project... Christ's return and the predictable response of his followers... policemen so bent they're ampersands... nostalgics yearning for strong leaders... hairspray accidents in several salons... Dream Topping and aggressively assisted suicides... Dream Tupping... the joy of calipers... Poppy Tours' sideline... ghosts in an orchard... the slender chances of your father being your father... a trace agency from hell... Führer World... the mall near Pompey that wasn't built... corpses starved of oxygen... the nascent CIA... a patisserie called a P’tit Clamart... a light entertainer’s revenge... the queen of Flemish noir...a perpetual wanderer with impeccable dress sense and multiple passports...

Many of Empty Wigs' stories are indeed bleak, perverse, harrowing. Many are tragically farcical. Some of its characters are irremediable. Others are merely flawed.

But the writing is neon-rich, gorgeous and baroque, funny and joyfully offensive.

Bosch and Goya, Dix and Schad...They didn’t do Mr Nice Guy. They did not suffer from angelism. Nor does Meades.

Empty Wigs is Peak Meades.

PRAISE FOR JONATHAN MEADES:

'Meades has been compared, favourably, to Rabelais and, flatteringly, to Swift. The truth is that he outstrips both in the gaudiness of his imagination.' Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement

‘Meades is a very great prose stylist, with a dandy's delight in the sound and feel of words, and we are lucky to have him.' Ian Thomson, Spectator

‘Richly entertaining, invigorating, and provoking; the fearless Meades is to non-fiction what Michel Houellebecq is to the good-taste mongers and mutual masturbators of the fiction scene.’ Tim Richardson, Literary Review

Support this project

Quick select rewards

FEATURED REWARD

$45 + shipping

326 pledges

Signed First Edition Hardback

First edition hardback, signed by Jonathan - c.900 pages printed, with coloured endpapers, head & tail bands and silk ribbon marker.

PLUS:

Ebook
Your name in the back of the book

Choose this reward

FEATURED REWARD

$150 + shipping

11 pledges

La Grande Bouffe (Deuxième Partie)

PLUS:

Signed first edition hardback
Ebook
Your name in the back of the book

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Jonathan Meades

Jonathan Meades is a writer, journalist, essayist, and film-maker. He is the author of Filthy English, Peter Knows What Dick Likes, Pompey, The Fowler Family Business, Incest and Morris Dancing, Museum Without Walls, An Encyclopaedia of Myself, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen and Pedro and Rickey Come Again.

He has written and performed in many television films, among them Jerry Building, Joe Building, Ben Building, Father To The Man, Magnetic North, Off Kilter, The Joy of Essex, Bunkers, Brutalism & Bloodymindedness, and Jargon.

'Meades has been compared, favourably, to Rabelais and, flatteringly, to Swift. The truth is that he outstrips both in the gaudiness of his imagination’ Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement

‘Meades is a very great prose stylist, with a dandy’s delight in the sound and feel of words, and we are lucky to have him’ Ian Thomson, Spectator

‘Richly entertaining, invigorating and provoking; the fearless Meades is to non-fiction what Michel Houellebecq is to the good-taste mongers and mutual masturbators of the fiction scene’ Tim Richardson, Literary Review

‘A marriage of Borges, Betjeman and Bronowski’ Paul Lay, History Today

‘Lively, inventive and pugnacious . . . in an English literary tradition that, sweeping up Ian Nairn, John Betjeman and Charles Dickens along the way, takes us back to William Cobbett’s Rural Rides’ Jonathan Glancey, Architectural Review

‘Meades is fast, splenetic and brilliant’ Andrew Billen, The Times

‘Provocative, opinionated, allusive, variously heretical and revisionist’ Martin Hoyle, Financial Times

‘Meades is brainy, scabrous, mischievous and a bugger to pigeonhole: a fizzing anomaly’ Tim Teeman, The Times

‘As somebody said of Nietzsche (and I doubt if Meades would object to the grandiose comparison) the lack of system is a sign of generosity of mind’ Rowan Moore, Observer
Sir Geoffrey Shadoxhurst BT

I loved Sundays when I was a little chap. Waking up, sitting in bed impatiently gnawing at Raggedy Reggy Fitzroy till I heard the distant bell for matins. It rang out across the misty meadows and the deer park, never quite drowning out the racket of the rooks in the elms. Those bells were my signal. Time to get up and creep past Nanny Shadox’s room. Then I walk stealthy as a ghost down the backstairs to my parents’ part of the house. The corridor dado was tan lincrusta with a thistle pattern. All along it on the walls were those ancient framed photos of the family, the house, the lodges, the Redoubt, Home Marsh, Friary Field, the heady hothouses (peaches, figs, apricots, custard apples, persimmons), the staff. Whilst the park church (Henry Woodyer 1861) is extant, the village churchyard was desecrated in the name of progress: the word by-pass signifies rotting coffins exhumed and waiting to be removed and corpses too dead to make their escape. So much has gone. People, whatever their station, have their term. All but one of the Shadoxhursts who came and went and who, in their brief span, got, one after the other, the photography bug, have gone. Astonishing how much places change too.

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