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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.
"Starred Review. Hall finds the weirdness in everyday life and makes the strange feel quotidian." - Kirkus
"Hall (How To Paint a Dead Man), a Granta Best of Young British Novelists, is not as well known as some of her contemporaries. She deserves a closer look for her beguiling collection." - Library Journal
"Razor-sharp writing ("She had long black hair down to her backside, upholstered lips and hipbones that jutted out of her jeans like scaffolding.") forms a striking canvas for stories which teeter on the edge of bizarre and are riveting and vital." - Booklist
"So fearsomely excellent it almost hurt to read. Truly the best collection I've come across in a decade." - Wells Tower
"I devoured Sarah Hall's Madam Zero like Mrs. Fox eats a pigeon with clipped wings. Reading this collection was like reading Kelly Link or Kevin Wilson or Lucy Wood's stories for the first time. These are the kind of sexual, surreal stories I yearn to read and aspire to write." - Helen Ellis, author of American Housewife
"What a marvelous collection! I loved these stories, each one inviting us - with bright, clear, and startling sentences - on a journey into the heart of wilderness: what it is, where it resides, and how we each hunger for its many incarnations." - Robin MacArthur, author of Half-Wild: Stories
This information about Madame Zero was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Hall was born in 1974 in Cumbria, England. She received a master of letters in creative writing from Scotland's St. Andrews University and has published four novels. Haweswater won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (overall winner, Best First Novel) and a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award. The Electric Michelangelo was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Eurasia Region), and the Prix Femina Étranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Daughters of the North won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. How to Paint a Dead Man was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction. In 2013 Hall was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, a prize awarded every ten years, and she won the BBC National Short Story Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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