The Red Dancer - Softcover

Richard Skinner is the author of a previous novel, The Red Dancer, which was translated into seven languages. He has also published a collection of poetry, the light user scheme, and a writer's handbook, Fiction Writing. A translation of The Velvet Gentleman was shortlisted in France for the Prix Livres & Musiques. He is Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy.

'Not quite a biography, nor exactly a novel... an impressionistic collage of imagined and researched material, an original and absorbing version of a cryptic life.' Daily Telegraph 'A fictionalised life of Mata Hari that tentatively, delicately and poignantly fills in the person behind the myth... Her story is told by multiple narrators, people who crossed her path but hardly knew her, so that her own perspective lingers in shadow, glinting here and there in hints... the mystery makes the woman, a self-indulgent lover of luxury without practical virtues, seem that much more vulnerable.' Observer '[The Red Dancer] eschews sensationalism in favour of an elegant understatedness that lends gravitas to a sad and complex tale.' Big Issue