The modern fairies

'Elegant and decadent, vulgar and clever, enchanting and dark.

The love child of Angela Carter and Anaïs Nin - the book I really really needed' SARAH PERRY, author of The Essex SerpentWhy don't they tell you it is the beautiful princess who becomes the evil queen; that they are just the same person at different points in their story?Versailles, 1682: a city of the rich, a living fairy-tale, Louis XIV's fever dream.

It's a place of opulence, beauty, and power. But strip back the lavish exterior of polite society, and you'll find a dark undercurrent of sexual intrigue and vicious gossip.

Nobody is safe here - no matter how highly born they are. No one knows this better than Madame Marie d'Aulnoy.

Each week, a rogue group of intellectuals gather at her Parisian home to debate, flirt and perform Contes de Fées - fairy tales - that challenge the status quo, at a salon that will change the course of literature forever.

But while they weave tales of glass slippers, enchanted beasts and long-haired princesses, a wolf is lurking, who threatens to destroy the members of the salon one by one. Brilliant and bawdy, romantic and provocative, The Modern Fairies is a dazzling novel inspired by real events, about the delights and dangers of storytelling in dark times. 'Funny, filthy, dancingly clever: a delectable confection of many-layered pleasures.

A story of stories, storytellers, and the lurking dangers of fairytales.

It reminded me of Jeanette Winterson's The Passion, and I gobbled it all up' JOANNA QUINN, author of The Whalebone Theatre'Original, fantastical, historical, and unputdownable' KAREN JOY FOWLER, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves'Pollard's future, as a novelist, is very bright indeed' THE I, praise for Delphi