Madame Zero
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
*WINNER OF THE BBC NATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD 2020*
SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2018
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2018
WINNER OF THE EAST ANGLIAN BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
WINNER OF AN O.HENRY PRIZE FOR SHORT FICTION
She is running and becoming smaller, running and becoming smaller, running in the light of the reddening sun, the red of her hair and her coat falling, the red of her fur and her body loosening. Running. Holding behind her a sudden, brazen object, white-tipped. Her yellow scarf trails in the briar. All vestiges shed.
Sarah Hall is an exquisite chronicler of landscapes - rural, industrial, psychological - and these haunting stories reveal a writer at the peak of her powers. Rich in the mythic symbolism of wilderness and wasteland, these tales blur the natural and urban, mundane and surreal, human and animal. Written in Hall's lyrical prose, this uncannily disturbing collection glitters with poetic and erotic imagery. Marked by a fascination with the intimacy of nature - and the nature of intimacy - Madame Zero is a stunning new collection from an author twice nominated for the Booker Prize.
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Hall's second collection of short stories is a disquieting demonstration of the power of the form, in which "you may never get to the bottom of something. You might end up staring over a precipice," as do a couple and their friend in "Wilderness" when they attempt to cross a dangerous bridge over an abyss that is as symbolically charged as it is real. Two other stories, "Later His Ghost" and "One in Four," take place in the kind of altered or threatened landscapes for which Hall is celebrated the first in a dystopian future in which freezing temperatures and relentless winds have destroyed civilized life, the other in an era of a superbug that is devastating the population. In "Mrs. Fox," a man chronicles his wife's transformation into a fox. A woman's chance encounter with a former lover in "Luxury Hour" demonstrates the writer's penchant for unremitting melancholy, and "Evie," an exploration of a woman's escalating sexual desire, goes to the grim heart of human nature. These unnerving stories hover over unspoken truths; in "Goodnight Nobody," the message is so deeply shrouded as to be indecipherable. Hall, whose fiction is known for its sense of place (specifically the countryside of her native Cumbria), has set herself a challenge, searching for meaning in other avenues. The results are challenging and thought-provoking.
