"If you’re one of those readers who resist short stories, then the title tale in this collection might just convince you otherwise … This meditation on attachment and mortality is at once elemental and polished, compressed and expansive....Hall is a writer at the top of her game." — Mail on Sunday
"[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 … Take each story one by one and revel in Hall’s unique voice." — Stylist (UK)
The writing is luminous from the first page...Slipping seamlessly between fantasy and reality, [SUDDEN TRAVELER] is an ambitious, powerful and, at times, deeply unsettling book." — Observer (UK)
"Written in a poetic prose and veering into fantasy, [Sarah Hall’s] fluent new collection SUDDEN TRAVELER shows her sensational trademark themes of sexuality and mortality in various shapeshifting combinations … vividly done and never less than readable, it is all a heady and viable mix of visceral and slick." — Sunday Times (London)
"The third collection from one of the finest writers of short stories in English spans grief, parenthood and women’s agency … and rewards rereading." — Financial Times, Books of the Year
"Queen of dark short fiction Sarah Hall brought us more expertly turned tales of sex, death and danger in Sudden Traveller." — Guardian, Best Fiction of 2019
"Hall’s writing is, as ever, arresting, polished, charged with imagery, luscious and electric. Reading her in Sudden Traveller is like watching a fireworks display.... Always on display is a sense of concentrated, spiky, efficient power." — Times Literary Supplement (London)
"To enter into a world created by Sarah Hall is to step into a landscape that is feral and alive....The seven stories in SUDDEN TRAVELER merit savoring slowly: several of them reward rereading. Hall’s prose is briny and sensual....Her lyricism....reveals the influence of James Salter, but it’s a voice, fierce and unapologetic, uniquely her own." — Financial Times
"It’s hard to believe that Sudden Traveler is only Sarah Hall’s third short fiction collection. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize as a novelist, Hall seems to have made the short story genre explicitly her own....Altered states very much continue to be Hall’s theme in this new book[, her] most personal and beautiful work yet." — New Statesman
"[Hall's] greatest gift is, through a blend of the carnal and the cerebral, to invoke a physical response, something atavistic, in the reader." — Spectator (UK)
"With their dark sensuality, Sarah Hall’s magnificent stories have always had an unsettling quality, but her new collection, Sudden Traveler, is a particularly slinking, crepuscular beast." — Daily Telegraph (London)
"Disorienting, existential, and yearning ." — Booklist Online
"Some of the best short fiction this year has to offer." — women.com
"Sarah Hall is one of our most influential short story writers. Echoes of her dark magic realism, eco-apocalyptic landscapes, coolly sexual heroines and coiled, restrained, blackly ironic narrative voices are everywhere in the work of emerging writers." — Guardian
