The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
By Viktor Pelevin, translated by Andrew Bromfield
Faber £8.99, 352 pages
FT Bookshop price £7.19

“A virtuous fox must support herself only by prostitution,” explains A Hu-Li, a centuries-old fox currently incarnated as a Moscow callgirl. Unfurled, her bushy tail creates “a kind of sympathetic resonance” with her human client’s consciousness, which stimulates him to experience his deepest sexual fantasies. A Hu-Li gets her first lupine ravishment when a client, on arousal, transmogrifies into a wolf – which, in a typical Pelevin riposte, prompts her to dress as Little Red Riding Hood in sexy lingerie as “an ironic postmodern comment on what was happening”.

Philosophical discourse, epistemology, semantic and lubricious game-playing fuel this supernatural love affair with plenty of intellectual fun, from the notion of “‘Occam’s Razor’ condoms” to the satire of the “oil gargles” (oligarchs) and “upper rats” (apparatchiks) of Putin’s rapaciously consumerist Russia.