The Beautiful Indifference
Sarah Hall
The Beautiful Indifference
From the heathered fells and lowlands of Cumbria with their history of smouldering violence, to the speed and heat of summer London, to an eerily still lake in the Finnish wilderness, Sarah Hall evokes landscapes with extraordinary precision and grace. The characters within these territories are real-life survivors, but whether it's a frustrated housewife seeking extreme experience or a young woman contemplating the death of her lover, dark devices and desires rise to the surface. And the human body, too - flawed, visceral, and full of emotional conflict - provides a sensuous frame for each unfolding drama. Uniquely disturbing and deeply erotic, this collection confirms Sarah Hall as one of the greatest writers of her generation. The BEAUTIFUL INDIFFERENCE includes 'Butcher's Perfume', which was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Prize in 2010
4.0 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Short Stories |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
208 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
November 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0571230174 |
| Publisher |
Faber and Faber |
| |
From the heathered fells and lowlands of Cumbria with their history of smouldering violence, to the speed and heat of summer London, to an eerily still lake in the Finnish wilderness, Sarah Hall evokes landscapes with extraordinary precision and grace. The characters within these territories are real-life survivors, but whether it's a frustrated housewife seeking extreme experience or a young woman contemplating the death of her lover, dark devices and desires rise to the surface. And the human body, too - flawed, visceral, and full of emotional conflict - provides a sensuous frame for each unfolding drama. Uniquely disturbing and deeply erotic, this collection confirms Sarah Hall as one of the greatest writers of her generation. The BEAUTIFUL INDIFFERENCE includes 'Butcher's Perfume', which was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Prize in 2010
Reviews
The Scotsman
Peggy Hughes
"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?"
15/11/2011
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The Sunday Times
Lucy Scholes
"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 form a collection of astonishingly sensuous power …"
20/11/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Jodie Mullish
"ll six stories have darkness at their centre, each capturing a sense of wildness pulsing beneath a skin-thin layer of respectability."
14/11/2011
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The Guardian
Justine Jordan
"Monstrous events happen offstage over the course of these seven stories: beatings, maulings, suicide and abandonment. But their force is felt all the more powerfully through the measured precision of Hall's prose, which is always grounded in the exact immediacy of everyday detail."
24/11/2011
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The Independent
Nicholas Royle
"excellent collection, and while the care the author has taken over every word and line is obvious, the remarkable thing about Hall's writing, and most good writing, especially in the short form, is that the most important stuff is not what's on the page, but what's not. The stuff left out."
09/12/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Leyla Sanai
"These are stimulating, unsettling stories. I prefer Hall's novels, in which fragile characters can develop and moods build up to breaking point, but these tales still intrigue and mesmerise."
13/11/2011
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The Financial Times
Lionel Shriver
"It might have been preferable to have delayed publication of a collection until the author had accumulated a fatter stack of stories, all of which rose to the high bar set by the first and last in this collection. Nevertheless, especially when wedded to a tale with muscular narrative drive, Hall’s voice is strong and distinctive – even, in single, elevated passages, exquisite."
04/11/2011
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The Times
Catherine Nixey
"When reading these stories you do occasionally find yourself wishing that Hall would leave the monochrome of misery, and attempt to paint the more complicated colours of happiness. But then again, she does darkness so very well."
19/11/2011
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