Madame Zero is a stunning new story collection embracing the darkness, eroticism, and absurdity of human existence. One of our most celebrated authors, Sarah Hall is an exquisite chronicler of landscapes of all kinds - rural, industrial, bodily, psychological - and these gorgeous stories reveal a writer working at the peak of her powers. Whether depicting a husband who finds his wife utterly transformed, a child who becomes a case study in wildness, or a road trip overwhelmed by buried phobias, Hall is always deeply attuned to the uncanny strangeness that underlies our everyday reality. In these memorable scenes, she delights in the mythic symbolism of wilderness and wasteland, and revels in blurring thresholds between the natural and urban, mundane and surreal, human and animal. This is a haunting collection from a uniquely fertile imagination, written in lyrical prose glittering with the compacted power and striking imagery of poetry. Marked by Hall's characteristic fascination with the intimacy of nature - and the nature of intimacy - these intensely sensual, thrillingly inventive tales seek to expose our innermost fears and desires. Conceptually ambitious, yet magnetically tactile, Madame Zero is a vital new work from one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction.
Author
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Sarah Hall took a degree in English and Art History at Aberystwyth University, and began to take writing seriously from the age of twenty, first as a poet, several of her poems appearing in poetry magazines, then as a fiction-writer. She took an M Litt in Creative Writing at St Andrew's University and stayed on for a year afterwards to teach on the undergraduate Creative Writing programme. Her first novel, Haweswater, was published in 2002. It is set in the 1930s, focuses on one family - the Lightburns - and is a rural tragedy about the disintegration of a community of Cumbrian hill-framers, due to the building of a reservoir. It won several awards, including the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). Sarah Hall currently lives in North Carolina. Her second book, The Electric Michelangelo (2004), set in the turn-of-the-century seaside resorts of Morecambe Bay and Coney Island, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book). The Carhullan Army (2007), won the 2007 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction. Her latest novel is How to Paint a Dead Man (2009).
