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Published Jan 2013
208 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Winner of the Portico Prize
Winner of the Edge Hill University Short Story Prize
Short-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
Sarah Hall has been hailed as "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain's young novelists" (The Guardian). Now, in this collection of short fiction published in England to phenomenal praise, she has created a work at once provocative and mesmerizing.
"Visual and vibrant. Literary and lyrical." - Kirkus
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"Luscious short stories from uber-talented Cumbrian writer Sarah Hall, all told in ravishing prose." - Metro
"Reaches a standard that makes award juries sit up and take note." - Financial Times (UK)
"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 (UK)
"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 (UK)
"Shows her characteristic ability to cause disquiet ... Hall's sharply perceptive observations strike like slaps ... These are stimulating, unsettling stories." - The Independent on Sunday (UK)
"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." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Seven skillfully adrenalised stories, precise and sensual, in which the scent of violence is a constant." - The Guardian (UK)
"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 (UK)
"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?" - Scotland on Sunday
"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
"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
This information about The Beautiful Indifference 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 Cumbria, England. Her fiction has won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book), a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree, Jr., Literary Award, and the Portico Prize. She has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (South Asian and Europe region), the Prix Femina-Roman Etranger, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
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