‘To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all.’

From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales, in which kernels of trauma, loss, loneliness and obsession are glimpsed through the glittering gauze of fiction.

The Fool may have stepped out of a tarot pack – to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer’s mind. The Narrator proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep's clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. The power of narrative to trump a stark reality is perhaps at its strongest in the last story; in The Wishing Table the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual, and surreal stories: romps no doubt, yet deeply moral, and entirely unforgettable ones.

‘I love the way Anne Serre’s mind works, and her slyly seductive approach to narrative.’ ― Adam Mars-Jones

‘I read Anne Serre’s The Fool and Other Moral Tales two years ago, during a hard time. Reading it again, I am startled by the force and splendor of her descriptions of cruelty and compassion in families, friendships, sexual entanglements, art, poetry, tarot, and everything in between.’ ― Merve Emre, on Twitter

‘The three unique stories in The Fool and Other Moral Tales have a folk tale sense of the familiar and the perverse. They invite us into something playful, but it is the reader who gets toyed with... While described as moral tales, these stories do not give straightforward choices about good and evil. Instead we must scale their ambiguities and allusions with only the slightest of finger holds.’ ― Rónán Hession, Irish Times