Burntcoat

Product Information

And she remembers when she met and fell in love with Halit, a Bulgarian Turk who ran a small restaurant in the town where Edith lives. Oddly enough, this is my first experience of her novels, but I definitely want to go back and look into a few of her previous books. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. There is a deep sense of poignancy to the novel, a quality that stems from our understanding that Edith is facing her own mortality – she knows the resurgence will prove fatal this time as others have already succumbed.

It's also a beautiful and often feral story about a once in a lifetime love, a mother-daughter relationship that is different from usual ones and it's a book about art, creation and craftsmanship. Edith’s ground-breaking creations find a parallel in the (very explicit) sex scenes, which hungrily, almost desperately, challenge the impending siege of the virus.

If I had a reservation about this book – and to be honest it is quite a strong reservation – it is that I do not really see why a novelistic response to COVID has to be about a very different virus. While Edith’s impending death clearly sets the tone from the outset, there’s more than enough going on elsewhere to prevent it from being a ‘straight’ pandemic novel. I’m collecting titles of novels written around Covid and you’ve convinced me this one’s a great addition! This is a compelling and wholly original read that surprised me in the sense that it explores loss, grief, remission and our trials and tribulations as human beings in a way that I have never read it touched upon quite like before. Just as with other dystopian novels I’ve read, this one got under my skin and the realism left a huge mark on me.

Edith Harkness is a sculptor whose works are based on this ancient Japanese art with her most famous work being the Witch, a huge installation that is reminiscent of The Angel of the North.

Storage, auction, an exchange for cattle and cargo brought upstream from the estuary, or perhaps it was used to mend masts. The whole narration is presented in retrospect, with a now 59-year-old and dying Edith addressing the long-dead Halit as "you" and using the story as a means to make sense of her own destiny, the contingency of life. Edith, the main character, is an artist who lives with after-effects of a virus that resemble long-haul covid. I’m pretending I never read it, instead remembering only Hall’s mastery of the written word and the stunning, evocative intimacy of Burntcoat.

Hall started writing this novel when the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, and I love the hazy atmosphere of this melancholic, lyrical novel about love and illness.

Nothing had prepared me for the emotion I felt there, the acceptance, finding myself in tears and becoming part of the flood. Either reaction is understandable: producing art because you can’t sit still or throwing your hands up in despair. When I was eight, my mother died and Naomi arrived,” she later tells us, in a wrong-footing line that sets up the history of her mother’s life-changing brain injury, central to our understanding of Edith’s upbringing. While lockdown hovered just out of eyeline in Rachel Cusk’s Second Place and provided a coda to Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, its presence is far from a garnish in Sarah Hall’s new book, a tale of sex and death told by a sculptor, Edith, whose heady liaison with a Turkish restaurateur, Halit, meets a fork in the road with the advent of a deadly virus that liquefies victims from inside. In an unnamed British city, the virus is spreading, and like everyone else, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness retreats inside.