Faber bags 'scorching' lockdown novel from Sarah Hall

Faber is to publish Sarah Hall's latest novel, Burntcoat, in autumn this year. 

Described as an "electrifying novel of passion, connection and transformation", Hall began writing it on the first day of UK national lockdown in March 2020. 

The synopsis reads: "You were the last one here, before I closed the door of Burntcoat. Before we all closed our doors. In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. The symptoms are well known: her life will draw to an end in the coming days. Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world."

Faber has acquired UK Commonwealth rights, including Canada. 

Alex Bowler, publisher, said: "In years to come, Burntcoat will be regarded as one of the major literary landmarks of this era. The story of two new lovers confined, it is a sublime and scorching experience, an elegy burning with resistance, which no reader will forget."

Hall said: "On the first day of lockdown in March last year I woke up very early and started writing. That morning, everything felt eerily shrouded and in jeopardy. I remember a similar feeling from childhood. You’d wake to heavy silence, a sense of event. Some spring snow would have obliterated the valley overnight, and you’d have to dig out. Every morning, I got up and wrote while it was still dark. I was homeschooling my daughter, so I only had those hours. I’m not saying I was particularly equipped. But some part of me — a kind of first responder — wanted to work. I’ve been heartbroken by the last year, in so many ways. We all are. Like Burntcoat’s protagonist, I know art can’t really offer a cure. But I had to write this book."

Hall has been twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and is the author of five novels and three short story collections: The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes; Madame Zero, winner of the East Anglian Book Award; and Sudden Traveller, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. She is currently the only author to be shortlisted four times for the BBC National Short Story Award, which she won in 2013 with "Mrs Fox" and in 2020 with "The Grotesques". She has sold 102,739 books sold for £869,762 through Nielsen BookScan's UK Total Consumer Market, with her bestseller Haweswater on 15,284 copies sold in paperback.

Burntcoat will be published in the UK on 10th October. Custom House will publish in the US in November 2021. Rights have also been acquired by Ambo Anthos (Dutch), Sellerio (Italian) and Bourgois (French).