Fou

“This novel is clever, crisply phrased and readable. It convinces the reader that the mind is capable of the most determined efforts to rewrite history.”
TIME OUT

“Chris Wilson’s free-wheeling, friskily rhetorical style generates a fine comic exuberance.”
SUNDAY TIMES

“A fiction of highly coloured fragments … an intricately patterned fable.”
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

“This is Wilson at his best.”
DAILY TELEGRAPH

With a sharp-tongued, bitter-sweet nostalgia, from her attic in Islington, sustained by cognac and crisps, Liselotte Berg recounts her golden youth. Actress, sublime beauty, analysand of Freud and model for Kokoshka, Klimt, and Schiele, confidante of writers, kleptomaniac, drunk and multiple personality, her story is full of sharp wit and verve. What secret shame surrounds her cousin Felix’s nose? Whatever happened to her innocence? Why were her lovers so often named Carl or Gustav? Why did she spill mayonnaise on Franz Kafka’s manuscripts? Did she really help cause two world wars? Poignant, quirky and sparkling, ‘Fou’ is an erotic tragi-comedy and psychological mystery, set against the decadence, extravagance and perversity of ‘fin de siècle’ Vienna.