The Beautiful Indifference: Stories (P.S.) - Softcover

"Reaches a standard that makes award juries sit up and take note."--Lionel Shriver, Financial Times

"These stories constantly thwart one's dramatic expectations -- and are all the more dramatic for it ... This prose, particularly when used to convey the bleakness of the Cumbrian landscape, is wonderful ... She does darkness so very well."--The Times (London)

"Luscious short stories from uber-talented Cumbrian writer Sarah Hall, all told in ravishing prose."--Metro

"Balancing muscularity with achingly beautiful prose, these stories are dark, raw and heartbreaking. An immensely satisfying and haunting collection."--Clare Wigfall

"The Beautiful Indifference illustrates that short fiction is indeed a finely wrought art form, and Hall is an artist of considerable and concise skill. Each story is a gem, but together they from a collection of astonishingly sensuous power."--Sunday Times (London)

"Hall's voice is strong and distinctive - even, in single, elevated passages, exquisite."--Lionel Shriver, Financial Times

"Sarah Hall should be on everyone' reading list: I think she's the best British writer around right now...Her deftly exquisite marshalling of language - rendering it fierce and brutal, poetically stark, liltingly sensuous, even unabashedly sexual - matches the sinuous moods of these seven distinctive and accomplished stories."--Jonathan Ruppin, Foyles

"Hall evokes her landscapes with bewitchingly vivid prose. Her writing is gutteral and visceral...her characters are raw and sinewy. Every tale...delights and disturbs, ..illustrates that short fiction is...a finely wrought art...and Hall is an artist of considerable...skill. [A] collection of astonishingly sensuous power...Hall is a writer of both rare vision and talent."--Sunday Times (London)

"Sarah Hall's writing is breathtaking...I did actually stop breathing once or twice...I loved it."--Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast, Small Wars, and The Uninvited Guests

"Hall's vaunted writing prowess is apparent throughout... Without judgement, Hall seems to set her characters, and by extension all of us, on a scale with animals, rutting by instinct, violent at heart, governed by the same needs for warmth, sex, shelter and food."--Jodie Mullish, Telegraph

This unique and disturbing collection includes stories in which the serenity of a Finnish lake turns sinister when a woman's lover does not come back from his swim, a bored London housewife discovers a secret erotic club, and a shy, bookish girl develops an unlikely friendship with the schoolyard bully. Original. 50,000 first printing.