Madame Zero

From the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award, a dazzling collection of stories about relationships, the fragility of human life, and the inescapable power of the natural world.

Madame Zero is a stunning new story collection embracing the darkness, eroticism, and absurdity of human existence.

One of our most celebrated authors, Sarah Hall is an exquisite chronicler of landscapes of all kinds - rural, industrial, bodily, psychological - and these gorgeous stories reveal a writer working at the peak of her powers.

Whether depicting a husband who finds his wife utterly transformed, a child who becomes a case study in wildness, or a road trip overwhelmed by buried phobias, Hall is always deeply attuned to the uncanny strangeness that underlies our everyday reality. In these memorable scenes, she delights in the mythic symbolism of wilderness and wasteland, and revels in blurring thresholds between the natural and urban, mundane and surreal, human and animal.

This is a haunting collection from a uniquely fertile imagination, written in lyrical prose glittering with the compacted power and striking imagery of poetry. Marked by Hall's characteristic fascination with the intimacy of nature - and the nature of intimacy - these intensely sensual, thrillingly inventive tales seek to expose our innermost fears and desires.

Conceptually ambitious, yet magnetically tactile, Madame Zero is a vital new work from one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction.

About the Author

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the prize-winning author of five novels - Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border - as well as The Beautiful Indifference, a collection of short stories. The first story in the collection, 'Butchers Perfume', was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, a prize she won in 2013 with 'Mrs Fox'.