The Red Dancer - Tapa blanda

'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

The Red Dancer opens in 1895 when, as a young woman in Amsterdam, Margaretha Zelle answers a lonely-hearts advertisement placed by a soldier twice her age in a local newspaper. But her marriage to Captain McLeod of the Dutch army ends in tragedy and acrimony and she leaves their posting in Indonesia. Heading for Paris, she adopts the stage name Mata Hari - 'Eye of the Morning' - and reinvents herself as an exotic dancer. Mata Hari's fame soon spreads throughout the cabarets and theatres of Europe and, as the major powers lurch towards inevitable conflict, she begins to attract the attention of numerous admirers - many of whom are officers, all too keen to share their secrets with a woman of notorious intrigue and allure. Set against the dramatically imagined backdrop of pre-War Europe, Richard Skinner's novel weaves interlinking chapters of fiction and non-fiction to conjure up the life, loves and tragic end of a woman who continues to fascinate almost a century on from her death.