Review by Booklist Review
In this latest contemporary novel from acclaimed author Hall, there is art--"It's all art, even thought, everything is." Burntcoat itself is art: Edith's "chimerical home" containing her lofty art studio and her apartment. Edith's early life is shaped by her mother's limitations, her own solitary pursuit of art, and then her study under a Japanese master. Her first successful oeuvre is the imposing Hecky, "The New Colossus of British Folk Art," a roadside art installation of burnt outrage, a Scotch Witch beckoning travelers north. Through art, thought, and solemn narration, Edith unfurls her life. Her credible voice is that of daughter, artist, lover. Edith speaks revelations that mirror her art form, shou sugi ban. Her words land like the measured torching and blackening of wood, revealing grain, pattern, and beauty. Edith's story slants dystopic when a civil emergency takes hold and Edith and her lover face the fight of a lifetime. Richly descriptive and forthrightly sensual, this novel catches at sensibilities of heart and art as it attains its stunning conclusion.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hall (Sudden Traveller) delivers a powerful story of art and love set during a global pandemic. Edith Harkness, 59, is a famous and reclusive artist living in a massive industrial studio, Burntcoat, in an unnamed town in the North of England. She is coming to terms with the resurgence of the "novavirus," which is like Covid-19 but worse. Several years earlier, it killed her lover, Halit, and a million others in England. Edith knows she is dying but spends her time finishing a final commission, a national memorial for the dead that she feels "cannot possibly comfort." Edith grew up alone with her mother, Naomi, a famous writer who had to relearn how to speak and care for herself after an aneurysm. Edith thrived in her solitude as a child but when she went to art school, she faced the misogyny of teachers and was physically abused by a boyfriend. As her mother tells her, "Those who tell stories survive." In a shifting timeline, Hall works back to just before the pandemic when Edith meets Halit. As England goes into lockdown, the couple finds bliss at Burntcoat, but soon are both ill, and she has to care for him as the hospitals are full. Hall brings perfect harmony to the sweeping themes, such as a pandemic's impact on culture and the difficulties faced by a woman in the art world, and the prose, rich in description, is never overdone. This will serve as a benchmark for pandemic fiction. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The author of Madame Zero (2017) and The Wolf Border (2015) turns her attention to the pandemic. "Those who tell stories survive." This is something Edith Harkness' mother told her, and it's the opening line of the book her creator started writing when the United Kingdom went into lockdown in March 2020. This novel was born of a pandemic and is, obliquely, about a pandemic. Its protagonist has lived through and still lives with a world-historical disease, and Hall has earned a place in literary history as one of the first fiction writers to respond in a sustained way to Covid-19. The story is narrated by Edith and addressed to the lover with whom she sheltered from a deadly virus. This summary is available to anyone who reads a synopsis of the novel, but the author takes her time revealing who "you" is, and this gets at some of what makes this novel challenging--challenging being a word that can mean "effortful in a rewarding way" or "exasperating." The "you" that Edith addresses knows--presumably--much more than the reader does. It makes sense for the reader to stumble along for a bit, hoping to catch up, but the "you" being addressed and the "you" that is the reader remain persistently irreconcilable. This may be no problem at all for some, while it may be a trial for others. Beyond that, the success of this novel depends on the willingness of the reader to turn pronouncements about the human condition and disjointed personal vignettes into a compelling story. "There's blindness to new lovers. They exist in the rare atmosphere of their own colony, trusting by sense and feel, creatures consuming each other, building shelters with their hopes." This novel is built from a lot of passages just like that, interspersed with the events in Edith's life that inspire them. An interesting relic of a year when the world was in quarantine. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
