An electrifying story of passion, connection and transformation from ''a writer of show-stopping genius'' ( Guardian ). ''Dark and brilliant.'' SARAH MOSS ''A masterpience.'' DAISY JOHNSON ''Extraordinary.'' SARAH PERRY ''Hall has set a bar . . . Finely wrought, intellecutally brave and emotionally honest.'' THE SCOTSMAN In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. The symptoms are well known: her life will draw to an end in the coming days. Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world. ''Sarah Hall makes language shimmer and burn . . . One of the finest writers at work today.'' DAMON GALGUT ''Wonderful . . . The writing goes down smoking hot onto the page.'' ANDREW MILLER ''I can think of no other British writer whose talent so consistently thrills, surprises and staggers . . . With Burntcoat she has solidified her status as the literary shining light we lesser souls aspire to.'' BENJAMIN MYERS
'No one writes stories the way Hall does and quite possibly no one ever will. Astonishing, miraculous, a gift.' Daisy Johnson WINNER OF THE BBC NATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD WINNER OF AN O.HENRY PRIZE FOR SHORT FICTION The seven stories of Sudden Traveller immerse us anew in one of the most distinctive literary imaginations. In Turkish forests or rain-drenched Cumbrian villages, characters walk, drive, dream and fly, trying to reconcile themselves with their journey through life and death. A woman fitted with life-changing technology returns to the site of her strongest memories; a man repatriated in the near east hears the name of an old love called and must unpack history's suitcase; and from the new world-waves of female anger and resistance, a mythical creature evolves. Radical, charged with a transformative creative power, each of these stories opens channels in the human mind and spirit, as Sarah Hall once more invites the reader to stand at the very edge of our possible selves. 'Hall's stories are extraordinary. Magical. I never know where the next one will take me, but I know it will be unexpected, memorable, and built from language that crackles with energy.' Chris Power Praise for Madame Zero : 'So fearsomely excellent it almost hurt to read. Truly the best collection I've come across in a decade.' Wells Tower 'These stories leave the reader unsettled, thrilled, and changed ... Marvellous.' Jon McGregor 'I can't praise it highly enough.' David Mitchell 'Astonishing: humane yet otherworldly, disturbing, sexy and strange. The woman is a genius.' Jessie Burton 'Hall's stories are vixen-shaped: urban and rural, feral and natural, female and stinky, beautiful and tough ... Exceptional, compelling, frightening and authentic.' Guardian 'Stunning ... Each of these brilliant stories is a leap into a dark, mysterious void that ultimately reveals glittering terrors therein.' Independent 'An edgy, sensuous, and immediate writer of striking power and grace.' Sunday Times
For almost a decade Rachel Caine has turned her back on home, kept distant by family disputes and her work monitoring wolves on an Idaho reservation. But now, summoned by the eccentric Earl of Annerdale and his controversial scheme to reintroduce the Grey Wolf to the English countryside, she is back in the peat and wet light of the Lake District. The earl's project harks back to an ancient idyll of untamed British wilderness - though Rachel must contend with modern-day concessions to health and safety, public outrage and political gain - and the return of the Grey after hundreds of years coincides with her own regeneration: impending motherhood, and reconciliation with her estranged family. The Wolf Border investigates the fundamental nature of wilderness and wildness, both animal and human. It seeks to understand the most obsessive aspects of humanity: sex, love, and conflict; the desire to find answers to the question of our existence; those complex systems that govern the most superior creature on earth.
Walking ahead of him on the heath, his wife turns to look at him over her shoulder, 'Topaz eyes glinting. Scorched face. Vixen.' In language harvested from nature, Sarah Hall tells a story of metamorphosis, of wildness and fecundity, and of a man reaching for reason, who cannot let go of the creature he loves.
Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize England is in a state of environmental and economic crisis. Under the repressive regime of The Authority, citizens have been herded into urban centres, and all women of child-bearing age fitted with contraceptive devices. A woman known as 'Sister' leaves her oppressive marriage to join an isolated group of women in a remote northern farm at Carhullan, where she intends to become a rebel fighter. But can she follow their notion of freedom and what it means to fight for it?
SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2018 WINNER OF THE EAST ANGLIAN BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION Madame Zero is a remarkable collection of dark, sensuous stories set in sometimes conflicting landscapes - rural, industrial, psychological - all of which are hauntingly resonant with dread. Whether set in an apocalyptic storm, a local swimming pool, or a surgical theatre, Hall's stories inhabit a hinterland between the natural and urban, the mundane and surreal, human and animal.
The prizewinning debut from Britain's most exciting contemporary novelist. In a remote dale in a northern English county, a centuries-old rural community has survived into the mid-1930s almost unchanged. But then Jack Liggett drives in from the city, the spokesman for a Manchester waterworks company with designs on the landscape for a vast new reservoir. The dale must be evacuated, flooded, devastated; its water pumped to the Midlands and its community left in ruins. Liggett further compounds the village's problems when he begins a troubled affair with Janet Lightburn, a local woman of force and character who is driven to desperate measures in an attempt to save the valley. Told in luminous prose, with an intuitive sense for period and place, Haweswater remembers a rural England that has been lost for many decades.
On the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, Cy Parks spends his childhood years first in a guest house for consumptives run by his mother and then as apprentice to alcoholic tattoo-artist Eliot Riley.
Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles.
The Beautiful Indifference is a collection of intensely erotic and disarming tales, which span centuries, contemporary life and the future, and evoke landscapes as diverse as London's metropolis and lake Vuotjrvi in the Finnish wilderness. A woman who chooses not save her drowning lover. A frustrated housewife who arranges an appointment with the mysterious 'Agency'. A girl enamoured with a notorious Cumbrian horse-breeding family who innocently unleashes their wrath. Each story rotates on an axis of survivalism - natural and medical, physical and sexual - so that wolves and humans alike are exposed and hunted across the pages, then hung like elegant trophies.
