Sarah Hall – författare

From Booker and Orange Prize-nominated author Sarah Hall comes the tale of an imaginary England, a future dystopian society where the right to bear a child is determined by a state lottery system.

In this stunning novel Sarah Hall draws on the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell to imagine a dystopic England where terrifying new systems of control are in place and reproduction has become a lottery. When a girl known only as “Sister” escapes the confines of her increasingly repressive marriage to find an isolated group of women living on a remote northern farm, she must find out whether she has it in herself to become an active insurgent.

This fascinating novel considers what lengths women will go to in a brutalized world in order to resist their oppressors, what tactics they must employ to survive and remain free. But the story asks a wider and more difficult question: under what circumstances might an ordinary person become a terrorist?

"Hall''s writing manages to combine acute sensitivity and daring. ... Visceral and engaging. ... The emotional lives of her characters are skillfully realized in this bright weave of disparate voices–for whom art is at once a way of seeing and a way of life." —The Times (London)

The lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator—intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power. With How to Paint a Dead Man, , Sarah Hall, "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain''s young novelists" (The Guardian), delivers "a maddeningly enticing read...an amazing feat of literary engineering" (The Independent on Sunday).

Winner of the Portico PrizeWinner of the Edge Hill University Short Story PrizeShort-listed for the Frank O''Connor International Short Story Award

“Every one of the seven tales here delights and disturbs in equal measure. The Beautiful Indifference illustrates that short fiction is indeed a finely wrought art form, and Hall is an artist of considerable and concise skill. Each story is a gem, but together they from a collection of astonishingly sensuous power.”  — Sunday Times (London)

Sarah Hall has been hailed as "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain''s young novelists" (The Guardian). Now, in this remarkable collection of short fiction, she has created a work at once provocative and mesmerizing. 

From the award-winning author of The Electric Michelangelo, one of the most decorated young British writers working today, comes a literary masterpiece: a breathtaking work that beautifully and provocatively surveys the frontiers of the human spirit and our animal drives.

For almost a decade, zoologist Rachel Caine has lived a solitary existence far from her estranged family in England, monitoring wolves in a remote section of Idaho as part of a wildlife recovery program. But a surprising phone call takes her back to the peat and wet light of the Lake District where she grew up. The eccentric Earl of Annerdale has a controversial scheme to reintroduce the Grey Wolf to the English countryside, and he wants Rachel to spearhead the project. Though she’s skeptical, the earl’s lands are close to the village where she grew up, and where her aging mother now lives.

While the earl’s plan harks back to an ancient idyll of untamed British wilderness, Rachel must contend with modern-day realities—health and safety issues, public anger and fear, cynical political interests. But the return of the Grey unexpectedly sparks her own regeneration.

Exploring the fundamental nature of wilderness and wildness, The Wolf Border illuminates both our animal nature and humanity: sex, love, conflict, and the desire to find answers to the question of our existence—the emotions, desires, and needs that rule our lives.

In this provocative and haunting collection of short stories, edited by two masters of the form, a diverse group of contemporary writers probes the nature and connection between two of the most powerful, exhilarating, and terrifying forces that define and shape the human experience.

“What else is there?”—Alice Munro, on why so much of her work deals with the twin themes of sex and death.

The drive for life—for survival and reproduction—and the drive for death—for violence and self-destruction—are the two dominant, instinctive urges of human behavior. These conflicting compulsions, characterized by Freud as Eros and Thanatos, are also the central themes of great literature. In Sex and Death, some of today’s most compelling writers from around the globe—Kevin Barry, Lynn Coady, Ceridwen Dovey, Robert Drewe, Damon Galgut, Petina Gappah, Sarah Hall, Peter Hobbs, Yiyun Li, Alexander MacLeod, Ben Marcus, Jon McGregor, Guadalupe Nettel, Courttia Newland, Taiye Selasi, Ali Smith, Wells Tower, Claire Vaye Watkins, Alan Warner, Clare Wigfall—explore these challenging themes with honesty, psychological acuity, brutality, tenderness, and empathy, in stories that are disquieting, illuminating, funny, and utterly dazzling.

From one of the most accomplished British writers working today, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Wolf Border, comes a unique and arresting collection of short fiction that is both disturbing and dazzling.

Sarah Hall has been hailed as "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain’s young novelists" (The Guardian), a writer whose "intelligence and ambition are thrilling to behold" (BookForum). Her work has been acclaimed as "amazing . . . terrific and original" (Washington Post). In this collection of nine works of short fiction, she uses her piercing insight to plumb the depth of the female experience and the human soul.

A husband’s wife transforms into a vulpine in "Mrs. Fox," winner of the BBC Short Story Prize. In "Case Study 2, " A social worker struggles with a foster child raised in a commune. A new mother runs into an old lover in "Luxury Hour." In incandescent prose, full of rich observations and striking clarity, Hall has composed nine wholly original pieces—works of fiction that will resonate long after the final page is turned.

An electrifying novel of mortality, passion, and human connection, set against the backdrop of a deadly global virus—from the “astonishing, miraculous” (Daisy Johnson) Man Booker–nominated writer

You were the last one here, before I closed the door of Burntcoat. Before we all closed our doors . . .

In an unnamed British city, the virus is spreading, and like everyone else, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness retreats inside. She isolates herself in her immense studio, Burntcoat, with Halit, the lover she barely knows. As life outside changes irreparably, inside Burntcoat, Edith and Halit find themselves changed as well: by the histories and responsibilities each carries and bears, by the fears and dangers of the world outside, and by the progressions of their new relationship. And Burntcoat will be transformed, too, into a new and feverish world, a place in which Edith comes to an understanding of how we survive the impossible—and what is left after we have.

A sharp and stunning novel of art and ambition, mortality and connection, Burntcoat is a major work from “one of our most influential short story writers” (The Guardian). It is an intimate and vital examination of how and why we create—make art, form relationships, build a life—and an urgent exploration of an unprecedented crisis, the repercussions of which are still years in the learning.

Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother''s legacy -- a consumptives'' hotel in a fading English seaside resort -- Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

The village of Marsdale is a quiet corner of the world, cradled in a remote dale in England''s lovely Lake District. The rhythm of life in the deeply religious, sheltered community has not changed for centuries. But in 1936, when Waterworks representative Jack Ligget from industrial Manchester arrives with plans to build a new reservoir, he brings the much feared threat of impending change to this bucolic hamlet. And when he begins an intense and troubled affair with Janet Lightburn—a devout local woman of rare passion and strength of spirit—it can only lead to scandal, tragedy, and remarkable, desperate acts.

From Sarah Hall, the internationally acclaimed author of the Man Booker Prize finalist The Electric Michelangelo, comes a stunning and transcendent novel of love, obsession, and the passing of an age.

“[Hall is] beloved by readers for her gorgeous lyricism and ability to delve into unexpected and illuminating tales of what it means to be human." -- Stylist (UK) Featuring her signature themes of identity, eroticism, and existential quest, the stories in Sarah Hall’s third collection travel far afield in location and ambition—from Turkish forest and coastline to the rain-drenched villages of Cumbria.

The characters in Sudden Traveler walk, drive, dream, and fly, trying to reconcile themselves with their journeys through life, death, and love. Science fiction meets folktale and philosophy meets mortality. 

A woman with a new generation of pacemaker chooses to shut it down in the Lakeland, 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 dark suitcase. From the new world-waves of female anger and resistance, a mythical creature evolves. And in the woods on the border between warring countries, an old well facilitates a dictator’s downfall, before he gains power. 

A master of short fiction, Sarah Hall opens channels in the human mind and spirit and takes us to the very edge of our possible selves.