‘Evie’ by Sarah Hall

I can hear your groan: this one, again? How many times? Yes, but its reappearance is testament to its brilliance. It’s a perfect piece. Jonathan Gibbs, of this parish, has written a precis which I cannot better, so all I’ll say is that the gutpunch I felt on first reading it, the knowing that, from now on, I’d have to undergo some harsh and hurtful self-examination, will forever be a component of my personal luggage.

First published in The Sunday Times, 2013, and collected in Madam Zero, Faber, 2017

‘Then Later, His Ghost’ by Sarah Hall

A chilling story, not for the usual ghostly reasons, despite the title.

This story is set in a bleak dystopian future, with a constant gale-force icy wind. A young man struggles to survive – nothing can grow, all the animals and birds have gone, and, heavily protected by layers of clothing, thick gloves and goggles, he goes around looking for food in abandoned buildings, which sometimes collapse around him. There is a woman living in the house with him, Helene. They are not partners, in fact she is his former teacher, but he suspects she doesn’t recognise him. She is heavily pregnant, and barely moves, perhaps from despair. But he is determined to find her a Christmas gift, some Shakespeare, seemingly impossible in a world where almost everything has been destroyed.

This is speculative climate fiction, depicting a brutally cold and inhuman world, uncanny in its indifference to any fragile bodies simply trying to survive. I can’t imagine how much worse everything will become when the baby arrives.

Much of the story is simply description – but how powerful that description is, and how varied. How many ways are there to describe wind and cold, or abandoned interiors? More than I would have imagined.

“The wind was coming from the east when he woke. The windows on that side of the house boxed and clattered in their frames, even behind the stormboards, and the corrugated-iron sheet over the coop in the garden was hawing and creaking, as though it might rip off its rivets and fly off. The bellowing had come into his sleep, like a man’s voice…”

As a climate writer myself, this haunting story got under my skin and gets into my anthology.

First published in The New Statesman, 2014. You can find it here, along with a link to an audio recording. Collected in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, ed. Philip Hensher, Penguin, 2019

‘Evie’ by Sarah Hall

I realise on looking through this list that few of the stories I’ve selected have a plot twist of the kind that, growing up, it was impressed on me a good short story ought to have (it’s probably hard to teach a child about a gradual dawning realisation or a shift in perspective that casts previous details in a new light). “Evie” is an exception: a brilliant and alarming narrative that builds and builds before a devastating revelation transforms it into an entirely different kind of story. It starts small, with the narrator startled when his wife, the titular Evie, scoffs a bar of chocolate despite not having much of a sweet tooth. Gradually, Evie’s appetites intensify and expand, and soon she is exhibiting wilder hungers. Seeming to pick up her husband’s mild, almost genial sense of marital frustration, she begins behaving in ways that eerily reflect, even anticipate, his idle sexual fantasies. What begins as a kind of wish-fulfilment for her husband – the wife as wanton – becomes ever more dangerous. Unnerving, too, is the growing sense that even this “good man”, who’s on the verge of boasting about this change in his circumstances, thinks on some level of Evie as property to be commodified. Desire itself, personified, is overtaking the characters, warping them into new shapes … and then the twist comes. The wonderful tension here is between the storyline’s almost outrageous eroticism – how far is Evie going to go? How implicated is a reader titillated by the frank and graphic descriptions of Evie’s suddenly boundless sexuality? – and Hall’s always meticulous writing, her precise sentences and alertness to detail.

First published in The Sunday Times, July 2013, and available to read here; collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017; also in Sex and Death, ed. Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs, Faber, 2017

‘Butcher’s Perfume’ by Sarah Hall

What an opening to a short story: “Later, when I knew her better, Manda told me how she’d beaten two girls at once outside the Crane-makers Arms in Carlisle.” There’s more, much more. Manda Slessor comes from a family where violence is a way of life. Violence underpins each sentence, language taken from the animal world to describe the human world.

I was worried and smiling, all at the same time, as a reader. There’s no messing with Manda, I thought. The writing is overpowering, unique, but similar to Mantel with its original turn of phrase and local dialect. Hall takes you into the guts of the character.

‘Butcher’s Perfume’ is gripping, filled with tension (great use of short sentences) and unsettling. It’s brilliant to be in the world of ‘Butcher’s Perfume’, but I was glad to leave it too.

First published in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber and Faber, 2011

‘She Murdered Mortal He’ by Sarah Hall

“The ocean wind was strong. Grains of sand stung her arms and face. Her dress fluttered. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps they were not in step.”

I once read someone bemoaning their fortunes in one of the big short story prizes: ‘How it works, basically, is everyone enters and Sarah Hall wins.’ Beneath the cynicism, there was also a grudging respect, acknowledgement that such success was deserved. I often tell my students that the best short story writers are Irish, or American, or African. Canadian. Rarely British. Hall being one of the few exceptions, her deep understanding and execution of the form almost unrivalled.

A quiet story, this, until, as with all the great ones, it isn’t. A couple holidaying on the coast of an unnamed African country, their relationship collapsing, take a break from hostilities and each other, the female narrator fleeing along the beach. A stray dog approaches her, threat and menace palpable. What follows might peter out in mere mortals’ hands, but of course Hall sustains the tension right up to the shocking finish, which is all the more impactful when we realise what has occurred off-stage.

First published in Granta 117, October 2011, and available to read here; collected in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber and Faber, 2012

‘The Woman the Book Read’ by Sarah Hall

“That same sensation, of wanting to hold her. She’d been a restless soul, would often shrug him off. ‘Küçük kuş.’ He’d loved teaching her words, little phrases. Sentences were harder, she didn’t understand the order of the syntax, but then neither had he at first, in reverse.”

The title of this story, with the noun at the beginning and the verb at the end, grammatically mimics how sentences are constructed in Turkish. In a Mediterranean coastal town in Turkey (possibly Kaş) a local man sitting at a café notices a young woman tourist when her female companion calls out her name. Her unusual name ‘Ara’ suddenly unleashes the past. Both comforting and painful memories run through his mind as he stealthily follows the two women down to the beach. Hall masterfully guides the reader through the tension generated in every moment. Until, near the end, when the nature of their past relationship becomes clear, the reader is kept on the hook, questioning the man’s intentions, whether he will get spotted by Ara or eventually have the courage to walk up to her and say hello. In 2018, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Hall for the Turkish online newspaper ‘T24’. During our discussion, while referring to ‘Who Pays?’ – a fairy-tale-like story of hers loosely also set in Turkey – I asked the author about her experience of setting a story in a country which she’s not from. Hall had responded, “There is something about the short story form that allows you to go in and come out. You don’t necessarily need to have known the place all your life. Whereas this wouldn’t be possible in a novel.”

First published in The New Statesman, July 2019, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Sudden Traveller, Faber & Faber, 2019

‘Mrs Fox’ by Sarah Hall

Nerve and instinct. Her thousand feral programmes. Should she not flee into the borders, kicking away the manmade world?

Like Angela Carter, Hall is a great prose stylist. Unlike Carter, who sometimes seems intoxicated by her own linguistic fireworks, Hall is all about control. She is chasing a different kind of literary kick. While Carter deals in mythic transformations, ‘Mrs Fox’ is something almost anti-mythic. It is weirdly mundane, extraordinarily prosaic in its careful and delicate descriptions and scrupulous account of events. It’s as if this kind of thing happens all the time: the metamorphosis of a woman into a feral creature. Hall commits completely to this fantastic notion, leaving no room for doubt. Reading this, one feels that reality is being stretched, being asked to contain more than it should be capable of. It is an astonishing achievement.

Winner of the BBC National Short Story Prize, 2013. First published in 2014 by Faber as a Kindle single, and collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017. Available to read online on the Toast magazine website)

‘Butcher’s Perfume’ by Sarah Hall

My wife is from Cumbria, and we go all the time – not to tourist central, but to the south lakes, the bits where Cumbrians live. Sarah Hall’s story might be from the other end of the county, but I love it for the feel of the grit and scramble of poor rural life, the strangeness of the out of the way corners of England, and above all the language – the odd, rough, Viking-inflected words of Cumbrian dialect.

First published in 2010 by Comma Press as part of the shortlist for the BBC National Short Story Award, then collected in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber, 2011

‘Live that you may Live’ by Sarah Hall

Sotheby’s commissioned this story to showcase a 19th Century carved mahogany bed for its ‘Erotic: Passion & Desire’ sale. Hall’s story is set in a humbler bed, where a girl-child wakes in the night. Her imaginings, and those of her mother, sweep into a dreamlike narration of the making and unmaking of women, past and to come. Though the carved bed is not described, the story works ekphrastically, leaving the mind full of the bed’s dark veneer, the deep glow of its wood, and its finely carved motifs: a siren, swans, wavelets and the crimped edges of cockleshells… The story’s warnings and promises are sensed like those felt on contact with an object that has journeyed through centuries, absorbing countless stories on the way.

First published, in a slightly different version, as ‘The Swan and the Courtesan’ by Sotheby’s on 2 February 2017, and is available to read here. Collected in Sudden Traveller, Faber & Faber, 2019

‘Butcher’s Perfume’ by Sarah Hall

I’d forgotten the family in this story were former travellers or a family with an indiscernible past, so it was intriguing to rediscover it. The story brims with energy and a latent violence, first shown by the fight between the main character Manda and a couple of school mates, which makes it sound brutal and rough, which it isn’t. The story fizzes in its own particular world, wonderfully evoked by Hall with her use of vocabulary – ‘brobbs’ ‘gannan’ and ‘dobby stones’ – to set scenes in the family home where Manda’s parents have an unashamedly robust and lusty marriage and her brothers are kind of wild.

Structurally, it’s interesting that literally the first three out of four sections are observations about the family and the narrator, Kathleen’s involvement with them. In the final quarter the story takes off as Kathleen encounters a neglected horse. The family’s rough justice towards the farmer who has inflicted such pain is a swift as the telling. Full frontal and adept. We’re given a chance to see the family before they go into action inflicting their own version of justice, but the story is rich in the telling and generous in its portrayal of those sometimes seen at the margins.

First published in BBC National Short Story Award 2010, Comma Press. Collected in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber, 2013

‘Mrs Fox’ by Sarah Hall

A couple live comfortably in their nice house, in their nice lives. They’re content. Until one day, without warning, the wife turns into a fox. Her husband tries to adjust, to keep her content in their old life but her new body, until he realises the impossibility of what he is doing. A fox cannot be kept as a wife. At the end of the story, he’s resigned to her new self, understanding that he cannot understand her, that she is not his, and perhaps never was.

First published in 2014 by Faber as a Kindle single, and collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017

‘Mrs Fox’ by Sarah Hall

This story, which went on to win the National Short Story Prize, is, like Daisy Johnson’s, a tale of metamorphosis. The short story form seems particularly suited to these – drawing tight boundaries around the boundary-less; building walls around that which can’t be walled in. Hall’s story, when first read, delivers a genuine, galvanising shock: it’s the tale of a married couple, living in comfortable suburbia, for whom all is easy, and comfortable, and well, until the moment when the wife turns into a fox. The story focuses on sex, in the first half, pre-transmutation: the husband and wife love one another and enjoy one another. But the fox whom the wife becomes isn’t a metaphor for sex: she’s purely, practically, entirely animal, leaving scat on the floor, musk on doorways, preferring her meat served up live.

The story is told through the husband’s eyes: it becomes clear, after the transformation occurs, that we’ve never known the woman; she’s as inscrutable in her human form as she is in her animal one. And what’s fascinating about the tale, the true strangeness at the heart of it, is not so much the transformation as the man’s reaction to it: his shock, of course, but then his acceptance, and finally his longing, his sense of loss. The fox has cubs, and the man knows them to be his, and he loves them, and their mother. He vows to himself that he’ll protect them, and realises that he cannot; that he has no place in their story. This is a story that obliges us to stay on its surface: try to dig deeper, to find sense or significance, and you find quickly that there’s no give; we simply have to accept what we’re shown. “He has given up looking for meaning,” Hall says of the husband, towards the end. “Why, is a useless question, an unknowable object. It is what it is, in other words. But what it is, is rich, strange, provoking and beautiful.

Originally published in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017

‘Luxury Hour’ by Sarah Hall

Another mother seeks escape in ‘Luxury Hour,’ this time at her local lido, paying a babysitter so she can grab a swim. “Luxury Hour, Daniel called it, as if she was indulging herself, but it was the only time she had without the baby.” On a sunny day, at my own lido, I can’t swim without remembering how Hall’s “light filaments flashed and extinguished in the rocking fluid”. This story is simpler than many of Hall’s, which often veer towards the fantastical, but it cuts to the quick of life as a new mother trying to ignore her midriff in the changing room mirror as she searches for a snatch of the person she once was. A chance encounter with an old lover adds a flick of Hall’s trademark eroticism; we learn her name is Emma and that she cheated on her then boyfriend, now husband. We know she feels trapped.

Collected in Madame Zero, Faber & Faber, 2017

‘Vuotjärvi’ by Sarah Hall

There’s a watery theme emerging but I make no apologies. Nor for choosing two by Sarah Hall. There is more swimming, more sensual evocation of time with a lover, and plenty more of Hall’s brilliant wordsmithery in this story about an unpronounceable Finnish lake. Air is glutinous, silence “benthic”, and no, I’m not ashamed to say I had to look that up. (“Of, relating to, or occurring at the bottom of a body of water.’) Even the mosquitoes get painted with care, “their legs floating long and dusty behind them”. A sense of doom builds from the opening two lines: “She stood on the pontoon and watched him swim out. His head above the lake surface grew smaller and more distant.” Another story that will haunt any lake swimmers among you.

Collected in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber & Faber, 2011