dam Thirlwell’s first novel in eight years is set in Paris in the period around the French Revolution. When we first meet Celine, she is a peripheral figure at the court of the dauphin; at 19, she has recently been married off to Sasha, a 46-year-old minor government official and ruthless “fascist”. She has also become the focus of a series of pamphlets, provenance unknown, containing pornographic fictions based on her life. In the early pages of the novel, Celine has been made into a kind of
