Daughters of the North
“Into the pantheon of Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin we can welcome Sarah Hall. Daughters of the North is an alarmingly relevant novel of a possible future. It is also a smart, thrilling, page-turning good read.”
—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of An Almost Perfect Moment
“The publication of Daughters of the North is unnervingly well timed: following a month of apocalyptic flooding, here is a dreadfully plausible and absorbing vision of a Britain whose unravelling begins with just that—a deluge of water…. With echoes of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and P. D. James’s The Children of Men, Hall’s dystopian landscape is far too close for comfort…. The novel is, among other things, a meditation on the inequality and difference of gender. The aim behind Carhullan is not just survival: it is to remove all male influence. In her savage training, Jackie deconstructs ‘the old disabled version’ of her sex and unlocks the violence in the female heart: ‘She broke down the walls that had kept us contained. There was a fresh red field on the other side, and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of war that history had never let us gather. It was beautiful to walk in. As beautiful as the fells that autumn.’ It’s an image that sums up the novel: as rich and exhilarating as it is disturbing.”
—The Times (London)
“With rivers bursting their banks, the stock market taking a tumble, an ever-present terrorist threat at home, and British forces engaged in two intractable conflicts overseas, the publication of Sarah Hall’s third novel could not be more timely…. Dystopian fiction is in vogue. In recent years, writers as diverse as Doris Lessing, Jim Crace, Michael Cunningham, and Will Self have offered their bleak visions of the future. What distinguishes Hall’s contribution is its local detail. Like her first novel, Haweswater (2002), Daughters of the North is set in Cumbria, and Hall’s sharp and vivid evocation of landscape (‘The light was fading fast, and the rust-colored bracken in the banks looked like a tide of scrap metal’) has the value of rooting her dark fantasy in a recognizable rural world…. This is a grim, uncompromising novel, unrelieved by either hope or humor. Just as she gives her central character no name, so Hall allows the reader no chance to identify with her emotionally. Her account is detached and dispassionate, written in prose as crystalline and craggy as the landscape, its unexpected usages—‘jeoparding,’ ‘prideful’—lending it weight. Although its narrative voice and political vision may be too bleak for many readers, the seriousness of Hall’s intent and the scale of her achievement are to be highly commended.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Considering the recent spate of unseasonable weather and car bombs, Sarah Hall’s third novel can’t help but have a certain resonance. Daughters of the North recounts one woman’s fight against the Man, both figurative and literal. It’s an interesting twist on the futuristic doom and gloom prophecy, shot with plenty of pace and grit…poignant reading for these dangerous and rainy times.”
—Malcolm Jack, The List
“Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall is a superb novel…. Set in a not-too-distant and imaginable future, Britain is dependent on America for food and fuel, and is run by an oppressive government. ‘Sister’ makes the decision to escape the misery of civilization in order to join a commune of female insurgents. Here the women are preparing for the struggles ahead as their community is inevitably threatened by the increasingly oppressive regime. This is a hugely compelling novel of a nightmarish but conceivable future, brilliantly written.”
—The Bookseller, “Bookseller’s Choice” (London)
“A community under threat was also the theme of Hall’s first novel, Haweswater, and she is an impressive writer on all the alliances, compromises, and tensions of group living…. This is a violent novel, strange and unsettling. It terrifies not because of its vision of a new world, but because of its understanding of the cruelty and mess we make of our personal relationships.”
—The Tablet, “Novel of the Week”
“Whether imagining the future or the past, Hall’s evocation of place and atmosphere is a joy…. An accomplished, provocative novel. The farm and its community are a triumph of the imagination: you could almost believe the author had lived among them as part of her research. This, combined with the luminosity of the prose casting its light across an emotional and intellectual landscape as bracing as the fells themselves, places Daughters of the North at the vanguard of the new wave of futuristic dystopian literature.”
—Literary Review
“Hall’s work renders the darkest emotional landscapes with a sharp eye and a warm heart. Hall’s acidic poetry follows through in Daughters of the North.”
—Time Out London
“After the recent disastrous floods, this novel is well timed…. The novel’s futurist vision is fascinating and disturbing.”
—Daily Mail (London)
“A futuristic tale, with shades of The Handmaid’s Tale, in which Britain is run by an omnipresent dictatorship known as the Authority, in which every movement is monitored and women are compulsorily fitted with contraception. ‘Sister’ gives an account from her Lancaster prison cell of her search for the Carhullan Army, a quasi-mythical commune of ‘unofficial’ women rumoured to be living in a remote part of Cumbria.”
—The Bookseller (London)
PRAISE FOR
The Electric Michelangelo
“The best moments are like this glimpse of the aurora borealis over Morecambe Bay: ‘It was light that had neither the impatience of fire, nor the snap of electricity, nor the fluttering sway of a candle. It was light that was nature’s grace, unhurried, the slowest, sweeping effulgence.’ Like that mysterious light, Hall’s novel is to be admired for its own slow grace.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Blindingly swell, like Stendhal describing the Battle of Waterloo, or Jack Kerouac’s description of parking cars in a crowded lot, or T. E. Lawrence when he cuts loose and sends thousands of noble Arabs roaring across unknown desert sands. It’s amazing work. A terrific and original novel by a splendid new writer.”
—Washington Post
PRAISE FOR
Haweswater
“Book lovers haunting the moors of literary fiction in search of another tryst as stirring as Wuthering Heights should embrace Sarah Hall’s first novel, Haweswater.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Grandly lyrical…. For all its overtones of Hardy and Lawrence, Haweswater tells the a story of a rural tradition drowned by development that echoes across cultures and continents.”
—The Independent (London)