Empty Wigs
Published on 5. February 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
1008 pages
978-1-80677-004-5 (ISBN)
Description
'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 Lueneburg 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, The Observer
'A head-spinning turn that can quicken from high farce into deep seriousness, vaulting across time and space' Chris Harvey, Daily Telegraph
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 Lueneburg 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, The Observer
'A head-spinning turn that can quicken from high farce into deep seriousness, vaulting across time and space' Chris Harvey, Daily Telegraph
Reviews / Votes
'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 '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 'He has an omnivorous curiosity and well-bred palate. These gifts are on show at all times, and at the level of the sentence. He finds the mot juste, the striking reference, to complete every brilliant line. Is it all a bit too much? Reader, it is' -- Stephen Smith, The Observer 'The horrifying, hilarious, always compelling labyrinth that is Empty Wigs' -- Paul Quinn, TLS 'Meades piles on the style, packing in metaphors, coinages and allusions until the crystals can't take it, swooping between social classes, doing the police in different voices' -- Keith Miller, Spectator 'It is as if Firbank, Anthony Burgess, Nabokov and Mervyn Peake had hunkered down in Elysium to concoct sentences over draughts of absinthe, and had then dispatched the result to Meades in a fever dream' -- Roger Lewis, Oldie 'Three hundred and whatever glorious and on occasion incomprehensible words . . . In every sense, a mag. op.' -- Jonathon Green, editor of Green's Dictionary of Slang 'I was remind of a huge museum of taxidermy with all the characters duly fucked and stuffed accordingly. Bravo' -- Chris Petit, author of The Psalm KillerMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 191 mm
Width: 130 mm
Thickness: 48 mm
Weight
680 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80677-004-5 (9781806770045)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Jonathan Meades' books include three works of fiction - Filthy English, Pompey and The Fowler Family Business - and several collections including Museum Without Walls, which received thirteen nominations as a book of the year in 2012. An Encyclopaedia of Myself was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014. His first and only cookbook, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen, was published in 2017. Pedro and Ricky Come Again (2021) was the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes (1988). Meades has written and performed in more than sixty highly acclaimed television films on predominantly topographical subjects such as French nationalism, the Baltic and dictators' architecture. He also creates artknacks and treyfs. Treyf means impure, not kosher: it defines his approach to all writing, film and art. He lives in France.