Book author: Sarah Hall

Edith is a middle-aged successful artist who creates huge sculptures, not unlike the Angel of the North, but made of wood and burned in a Japanese heat treatment that marks and strengthens the wood, adding to its durability and beauty as an organic, but carefully damaged material. There too, you feel the echoes of the themes of damage and illness as things that can create something different but also stronger and sometimes more beautiful.

She is the daughter of a writer, Naomi, who suffered a brain hemorrhage and was saved by radical surgery that meant she had to relearn everything from walking to talking and writing. Her damaged self was too much for Edith’s father who left them both when Edith refused to leave with him. Edith chose to stay with the woman who needed so much of her help to cope.

Naomi is one of the yous to which the narrative is written. This second person is deliberately slippery. Edith is dying. She is tying the pieces of her life up and she is saying goodbye. 

One of the other yous—for undoubtedly the reader is implicated too—is the man she fell for right before the pandemic took hold. A restaurant owner and chef, he moved in with her during isolation. I will say no more about him, as he and their relationship comes so wonderfully to life that I don’t want to spoil it by saying more. Let’s just say that again, this novel explores how brevity and fragility are often important parts of a different kind of immortal beauty. Her lover comes from a family of emigrants and he describes himself as a mix, a wonderful whole that has grown with and from division and loss.

It is this richness of themes and ideas, this thematic coherence, that makes Burntcoat such a pleasure to read. The story is a fascinating one but how all of these concepts, of what it means to be human and to live with mutability, damage, loss and regeneration, work together across the whole is a delight. It’s a brilliant novel. I finished reading it and turned back to the beginning right away. I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t make the prize lists. Oh, and it is published tomorrow so get your mitts on it now!

My next review will be of Seesaw by Timothy Ogene.

This is a very beautifully presented collection of short stories that do indeed stay with you after reading. I am particularly fond of four: ‘Mrs Fox’ that won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2013 about a wife who, well, you can guess; ‘Wilderness’ about walking along the Southern Cape coastline in South Africa; ‘Later, His Ghost’ set in a dystopian future where winds decimate the landscape; and ‘Evie’ about a sudden development of sexual desire. 

I like others, of course, but it is these four in particular that stay in my mind. If I were hard pressed, I’d probably pick ‘Wilderness’ as my favourite because it combines so many different things in one short blast. It’s an excellent showcase for what the short story can do. It can pack so many disparate ideas, feelings, emotions, and political standpoints into a snapshot of an hour or so. One English woman walks along the coastline with a relatively new South African boyfriend, of whom she is tiring, and his old childhood friend. Concepts of fear, danger, wildness versus ownership, it’s all in there, bristling alongside the complexities of friendship and desire. 

This sense of mutability, of our status as beings of nature in whom the wild still lives, sits at the edges of all of these stories and is what makes the collection such a pleasure to read. They tilt one’s look at the world enough to force us to see it afresh, to delight and be unsettled by it all over again. 

I haven’t read Sarah Hall’s other work, but it makes me want to. 

Winner of The East Anglian Book Award for Fiction, Madame Zero is a very enjoyable read indeed.

I’ll be reviewing Real Estate by Deborah Levy next.