Burntcoat

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The first double win in the Award's history, the news was announced live on BBC Front Row by Chair of Judges Jonathan Freedland in a special programme celebrating 15 years of the Award. 'The Grotesques' is available to listen to on BBC Sounds and appears in Hall's latest collection Sudden Traveller,, published by Faber in 2019. Its titular story was also shortlisted for the Award in 2018. And some really obscure ones! I love titles. I have a document just for titles – I’ve given titles away to friends who are writers.

Hall has crafted a harrowing and memorable vision of decay, collapse and recovery…BURNTCOAT is powerful…Read it tomorrow or a decade from now — either way, it'll convey a palpable sense of what it feels like to be alive in 2021, another grueling year shaped by an epochal crisis. Minneapolis Star Tribune the after-effects of her mother's severe stroke, which leaves her transformed mentally and physically, and leads Edith's father to leave the family home: When I was eight, my mother died and Naomi arrived - Edith using Naomi to refer to her mother after the stroke; My mum was a PE teacher and coach. One of her early gifts was to help me feel like a physically capable female. For the couple of years before she died, my body had taken a battering, with illness and major surgery, then pregnancy and the aftermath, so I wasn’t feeling at all hale. Carrying a coffin is not something a woman necessarily plans to do – usually men perform this task; assumed to be stronger bearers. It’s a frightening, demanding duty. Sarah was interviewed on BBC R4 Front Row about her 2020 BBC National Short Story Prize shortlisting: www.bbc.co.uk I loved and needed this full-throated yell of a novel about female desire, resilience, strangeness and artistic power, about the amplification of that power through suffering, and about the terror and beauty of bodies in extremis. Nobody writes like Sarah Hall, and here her lucid, vital, extraordinary style is matched perfectly to its subject -- it's an extraordinary work that will stand as blazing witness to the age that bore it.” — Sarah PerryNot good, and that’s probably why I write about it. I’m getting better – I think you have to as you get older. I’ve lost both my parents in the last six or seven years, and that throws everything into a different light. Novels are like marathons – you only have so many in you before your knees go Hall’s writing is prismatic and taut, borne along on passages of studied intensity. (This may underlie her success in the BBC National Short Story Award; no one else has won it twice.) At Edith’s first meeting with Halit, the text almost loses its breath: “I just couldn’t stop looking... Construction of bones. Volumes of the body. Scent.” Their first walk, down a chilly towpath, is described in a sensual hush. Even sex deferred is a thrill: two bodies “luxuriating in the long mutilation of desire”. But Naomi is already lost, and Halit will go as well, which will leave Edith, once more, alone. Unapologetically sensual and intellectual in the vein of Rachel Cusk and Siri Hustvedt, BURNTCOAT is a story for our times.” In this fairy tale, written exclusively for T, a mysterious accident occurs deep in the Turkish woods. I'm deliberately keeping this review short because I think each reader deserves to experience the trajectory of the story for themselves. But I'd say this is fiction that is almost masquerading as autofiction and has something of the sensitive thoughtfulness of a Deborah Levy or Rachel Cusk while at the same time pondering the intersection of art (the narrator is a sculptor) with individual and public crisis. All I'd say is... read it.

Some years before the novel opens the country, indeed the world, has been hit by a Covid-like epidemic:The Faber Interview. Sarah Hall speaks to Alex Clark about the inspiration behind her novel, Burntcoat, and the themes of her writing: www.faber.co.uk/journal Is it possible to work with a material so long and still not understand its condition? We are figures briefly drawn in space; given temporary form in exchange for consciousness, sense, a chance. We are ready-mades, disposables. How do we live every last moment as this — savant dust? My sincerest appreciation to Sarah Hall and William Morrow Custom House for the physical Advance Review Copy. All opinions included herein are my own. If I had a reservation, and it is quite a significant reservation, it is that for an apparently Covid-inspired novel, it is based on a much more severe version of Covid, which felt unnecessary.