From the author of Dead Glamorous comes this nihilistic novel of breathless elegance and unfettered imagination -- a disturbing, hedonistic journey through a young girl's twisted realityAmerican readers first encountered Carole Morin's dark vision in Dead Glamorous, a novelistic memoir that New Yorker writer Al Alvarez called wicked and funny and stylish. In her darkly brilliant first novel, Lampshades, Morin continues to pursue this dark vision. Her narrator, Sophira van Ness, is fair and democratic. She hates everyone -- the old, the fat, the poor -- and all fall victim to her even-handed intolerance. Obsessed with spiritual purity, death, and hygiene -- and consoled only by chocolate and frequent baths -- Sophira resurrects one hero from the graveyard of history: Adolf Hitler.Disturbing, but charismatic, Sophira draws the reader into a world of haunted reality and perverse glamour, watching, unblinkingly, as she visits the Queen at her toilet and as she falls in love with a latter-day Jack the Ripper. Lampshades is both blackly funny and utterly original, and confronts banality and evil with a cool, unflinching gaze. In Sophira van Ness, Carole Morin has created a seductive monster and in Lampshades a novel of breathless style blended with rare imaginative power.