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Burntcoat (Hardback)
An electrifying story of passion, connection and transformation from ‘a writer of show-stopping genius’ (Guardian).
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Summary
An electrifying story of passion, connection and transformation from ‘a writer of show-stopping genius’ (Guardian).
‘Dark and brilliant.’ SARAH MOSS
‘A masterpiece.’ DAISY JOHNSON
‘Extraordinary.’ SARAH PERRY
‘Searing… Sarah Hall’s best work yet.’ JON McGREGOR
You were the last one here before I closed the door of Burntcoat, before we all shut our doors.
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.
‘One of the best books of the year.’ TELEGRAPH
‘Hall has set a bar . . . Finely wrought, intellectually brave and emotionally honest.’ THE SCOTSMAN
‘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
‘Transporting . . . A beautiful novel, full of heat and darkness.’ AVNI DOSHI
‘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
Burntcoat is a dark and brilliant novel about love, art and fragility in a time of crisis.
Burntcoat is a searing piece of work, and an astonishing response to our times. Vivid, fierce, bursting with love and humanity and fear, I think this might well be Sarah Hall's best work yet. Which, as we all know, is saying a lot.
Hall’s writing is alchemical, magnificent, divine, bodily. Here are new ways to understand what it feels like to be human. Here are books to cherish. Burntcoat is a masterpiece. I lay myself at the altar of everything Hall writes.
Sarah Hall makes language shimmer and burn. She’s not afraid of big themes and has the talent to back up her ambition, but she’s just as good at the intimate and domestic... One of the finest writers at work today.
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 a blazing witness to the age that bore it.
Wonderful… Sarah Hall manages to infuse a whole novel with the intensity of one of her stories. The writing goes down smoking hot onto the page. Above all, it is the feeling of all this coming out of the writer’s depths that makes it so compelling. This will be among the very best of pandemic books.
SarahHall
Hailed as a ‘writer of show-stopping genius’ and a two-time Man Booker Prize nominee, Sarah Hall is the award-winning author of six novels and three short-story collections. Notably, she is the only author to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice —first in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and again in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’.
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Hall began writing the novel on the first day of national lockdown in March 2020.