‘A novel with oodles of charm’
The Times
 
‘Elegant, decadent, vulgar, clever, enchanting and dark’
Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment
 
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 … I gobbled it all up'
Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theatre