Empty Wigs

‘Prose that never ceases to dazzle’ Literary Review

Empty Wigs is a hallucinatory tour de force. It moves from bloody Algiers in 1962 to the Welsh Marches in the late nineteenth century, from Lüneburg Heath to suburban southern England. Its characters are damned and doomed. 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.

‘Loudly immoral, deafeningly well written and indiscriminately offensive, Meades’s novel is a breath of filthy air in a puritanical age’ 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’ The Observer

‘A head-spinning turn that can quicken from high farce into deep seriousness, vaulting across time and space’ Daily Telegraph

‘A baroque artist in a mannerist age’ The Spectator

OUT FEB 2026. AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW

Paperback: 1008pp

Published: Wilton Square (February 2026)

ISBN: 9781806770045