In seven scenic stories, characters reflect on the tumultuous moments of their lives while away from home. When capturing the self-reflective morass that people face when making tough decisions, Hall is at her best. In the title story, an author on a weekend getaway waits for her younger lover in her hotel room. He’s late, giving her time to replay their history and recall past conversations and decisions. Too nervous to read, she comes to the conclusion that, despite being a writer, she dislikes books. “Reading was an affirmation of being alone, of being separate, trapped.” Characters in other stories echo this sentiment. In “She Murdered Mortal Me,” a relationship sours during a South African vacation. A woman leaves her jungle bungalow and a brewing fight to walk the beach, haunted by fears of abandonment and rumors of leopards in the trees. Such psychologically charged situations provide opportunities for Hall to venture into contrived oversentimentality; but she never does. Stories begin without preamble, in the middle of scenes, momentum already building. Hall is in complete control, playing with the reader’s expectations at every turn, mirroring the unmoored state her characters all inhabit. An unassuming, tightly woven debut collection. Agent: Clare Conville, Conville & Walsh (U.K.). (Feb.)
Well worth the wait . . . These sensuous and hair-raising stories . . . bristle with pure caprice and sheer havoc. — Elle
“Incredible.” — Daily Beast
“Hall weaves together elements of gothic horror, futuristic sf, and the British tradition of murder ballads to create a strikingly original voice full of lyric intensity.” — Library Journal
“Reaches a standard that makes award juries sit up and take note.” — Lionel Shriver, Financial Times
“Visual and vibrant. Literary and lyrical.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Shows her characteristic ability to cause disquiet ... Hall’s sharply perceptive observations strike like slaps ... These are stimulating, unsettling stories.” — The Independent on Sunday
“These stories constantly thwart one’s dramatic expectations — and are all the more dramatic for it ... This prose, particularly when used to convey the bleakness of the Cumbrian landscape, is wonderful ... She does darkness so very well.” — The Times (London)
“Balancing muscularity with achingly beautiful prose, these stories are dark, raw and heartbreaking. An immensely satisfying and haunting collection.” — Clare Wigfall
“Individually stunning, together these stories comprise a tour-de-force collection that has reignited my love of the form.” — S.J. Watson
“Luscious short stories from uber-talented Cumbrian writer Sarah Hall, all told in ravishing prose.” — Metro
“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)
“Hall’s voice is strong and distinctive - even, in single, elevated passages, exquisite.” — Lionel Shriver, Financial Times
“Sarah Hall’s writing is breathtaking...I did actually stop breathing once or twice...I loved it.” — Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast, Small Wars, and The Uninvited Guests
“Hall’s stories are disturbing and delicate, surprising and sad, assured and sensual, with a deliciously dark tint to their edges. What better recommendation for a book of short stories than to be so enchanted that you want to flip them over and start all over again?” — Peggy Hughes, Scotland on Sunday
“Sarah Hall should be on everyone’ reading list : I think she’s the best British writer around right now...Her deftly exquisite marshalling of language - rendering it fierce and brutal, poetically stark, liltingly sensuous, even unabashedly sexual - matches the sinuous moods of these seven distinctive and accomplished stories.” — Jonathan Ruppin, Foyles
“Hall’s vaunted writing prowess is apparent throughout... Without judgement, Hall seems to set her characters, and by extension all of us, on a scale with animals, rutting by instinct, violent at heart, governed by the same needs for warmth, sex, shelter and food.” — Jodie Mullish, Telegraph
“Seven skillfully adrenalised stories, precise and sensual, in which the scent of violence is a constant.” — Helen Simpson, The Guardian
“Shows her characteristic ability to cause disquiet ... Hall’s sharply perceptive observations strike like slaps ... There is a deeply sensual element to her writing: it is visceral and instinctive ... It’s like sinking into a Rothko painting. Language is used inventively. These are stimulating, unsettling stories that... intrigue and mesmerise.” — The Independent on Sunday
“Hall evokes her landscapes with bewitchingly vivid prose. Her writing is gutteral and visceral…her characters are raw and sinewy. Every tale…delights and disturbs,..illustrates that short fiction is…a finely wrought art…and Hall is an artist of considerable…skill. [A] collection of astonishingly sensuous power...Hall is a writer of both rare vision and talent.” — Sunday Times (London)
“These stories...constantly thwart one’s dramatic expectations—and are all the more dramatic for it. This prose...is wonderful.” — The Times (London)
“...the best British writer around right now.” — Jonathan Ruppin
“THE BEAUTIFUL INDIFFERENCE is a work of art. Each of these stories takes the reader so fully, sensually, and immediately into its world that there is no possibility of putting the book down in the middle of one.” — Laura Kasischke, author of the NBCC-winning Space, in Chains
“Hall’s women are cheated on, broken up with, sick, bored, lonely; and her writing pulls the reader into subtly rendered but deeply felt worlds . . . American readers who cut their teeth on Joyce Carol Oates . . . will want to give this collection a try.” — Booklist
“Hall’s prose can be intimate or elliptical but the effect is never less than striking...She expertly evokes unquiet thoughts, broken lives, and haunting encounters with nature, and the work that results never fails to be thrilling.” — Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Hall evokes her landscapes with bewitchingly vivid prose. Her writing is gutteral and visceral…her characters are raw and sinewy. Every tale…delights and disturbs,..illustrates that short fiction is…a finely wrought art…and Hall is an artist of considerable…skill. [A] collection of astonishingly sensuous power...Hall is a writer of both rare vision and talent.
Luscious short stories from uber-talented Cumbrian writer Sarah Hall, all told in ravishing prose.
These stories...constantly thwart one’s dramatic expectations--and are all the more dramatic for it. This prose...is wonderful.
Shows her characteristic ability to cause disquiet ... Hall’s sharply perceptive observations strike like slaps ... There is a deeply sensual element to her writing: it is visceral and instinctive ... It’s like sinking into a Rothko painting. Language is used inventively. These are stimulating, unsettling stories that... intrigue and mesmerise.
The Independent on Sunday
Luscious short stories from uber-talented Cumbrian writer Sarah Hall, all told in ravishing prose.
Balancing muscularity with achingly beautiful prose, these stories are dark, raw and heartbreaking. An immensely satisfying and haunting collection.
Incredible.
Reaches a standard that makes award juries sit up and take note.
Individually stunning, together these stories comprise a tour-de-force collection that has reignited my love of the form.
Well worth the wait . . . These sensuous and hair-raising stories . . . bristle with pure caprice and sheer havoc.
Hall’s stories are disturbing and delicate, surprising and sad, assured and sensual, with a deliciously dark tint to their edges. What better recommendation for a book of short stories than to be so enchanted that you want to flip them over and start all over again?
Hall’s prose can be intimate or elliptical but the effect is never less than striking...She expertly evokes unquiet thoughts, broken lives, and haunting encounters with nature, and the work that results never fails to be thrilling.
Sarah Hall should be on everyone’ reading list : I think she’s the best British writer around right now...Her deftly exquisite marshalling of language - rendering it fierce and brutal, poetically stark, liltingly sensuous, even unabashedly sexual - matches the sinuous moods of these seven distinctive and accomplished stories.
Sarah Hall’s writing is breathtaking...I did actually stop breathing once or twice...I loved it.
Hall’s vaunted writing prowess is apparent throughout... Without judgement, Hall seems to set her characters, and by extension all of us, on a scale with animals, rutting by instinct, violent at heart, governed by the same needs for warmth, sex, shelter and food.
Seven skillfully adrenalised stories, precise and sensual, in which the scent of violence is a constant.
Hall’s women are cheated on, broken up with, sick, bored, lonely; and her writing pulls the reader into subtly rendered but deeply felt worlds . . . American readers who cut their teeth on Joyce Carol Oates . . . will want to give this collection a try.
THE BEAUTIFUL INDIFFERENCE is a work of art. Each of these stories takes the reader so fully, sensually, and immediately into its world that there is no possibility of putting the book down in the middle of one.
Hall’s women are cheated on, broken up with, sick, bored, lonely; and her writing pulls the reader into subtly rendered but deeply felt worlds . . . American readers who cut their teeth on Joyce Carol Oates . . . will want to give this collection a try.
Luscious short stories from uber-talented Cumbrian writer Sarah Hall, all told in ravishing prose.
"Shows her characteristic ability to cause disquiet ... Hall’s sharply perceptive observations strike like slaps ... There is a deeply sensual element to her writing: it is visceral and instinctive ... It’s like sinking into a Rothko painting. Language is used inventively. These are stimulating, unsettling stories that... intrigue and mesmerise."
Seven stories populate award-winning English novelist (How to Paint a Dead Man , 2009, etc.) Hall's first collection. "Butcher's Perfume" is set up against the Scottish border, "burnt farm, red-river, raping territory," where motherless Kathleen falls in with the Slessors, a prosperous family with a "gipsy" mother. Intrigued by petite and blue-eyed, hard-bitten and combative Manda, Kathleen soon needs help from a brother, Aaron, who rights a wrong with a brutal fierceness. In the title story, an older-woman–younger-man couple meet for a tryst. The man is a doctor-in-training, and there are intimations the woman is mortally ill. Next comes "Bees," rendered in second person. A woman, disgraced by her husband's illegitimate child, leaves her beloved northland's "great heathered fells" to seek refuge with a London friend, lingering there unemployed, unemployable, contemplating a garden filled with dead bees. In "The Agency," a comfortable life, thriving children and a professorial husband are risked by a woman after a sophisticated friend introduces her to an elegant service willing to provide a companion "to meet all possible needs." Lovers take a vacation to an isolated African resort in "She Murdered the Mortal He." There is a fracture in the relationship, and frustrated, she walks to a nearby village, glimpsing "in a clean bolt of panic," a white shape trailing her. It is but a dog, a beast that later returns with a bloodied muzzle. Most affecting is "The Nightlong River," a story of north country girls shortly after the Great War. The land has been seized by winter so cold as to be an "inverse Eden." Magda is ill. Dolly attempts to help, learning in the end the dead leave us in "the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign." The collection concludes with "Vuotjärvi." A couple vacation at a remote Finnish lake, and on an idyllic summer outing, the man attempts to swim to an island and disappears. Visual and vibrant. Literary and lyrical.
