Book description
The Beautiful Indifference is a collection of intensely erotic and
disarming tales, which span centuries, contemporary life and the
future, and evoke landscapes as diverse as London's metropolis and
lake Vuotjrvi in the Finnish wilderness. A woman who chooses not save
her drowning lover. A frustrated housewife who arranges an appointment
with the mysterious 'Agency'. A girl enamoured with a notorious
Cumbrian horse-breeding family who innocently unleashes their wrath.
Each story rotates on an axis of survivalism - natural and medical,
physical and sexual - so that wolves and humans alike are exposed and
hunted across the pages, then hung like elegant trophies.
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She received a BA from
Aberystwyth University, Wales, and a MLitt in Creative Writing from St
Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of Haweswater, which won the 2003
Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors
Betty Trask Award, and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize. In 2004, her
second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was short-listed for the Man
Booker prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region), and the
Prix Femina Etranger, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize for
Fiction. Her third novel, The Carhullan Army, was published in 2007, and
won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award,
a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, and was short-listed for the Arthur
C. Clarke Award for science fiction. Her fourth novel, How to Paint a
Dead Man, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the
Portico Prize for Fiction 2010. She was shortlisted for the BBC National
Short Story Comp 2010 for Butcher's Perfume while Vuotjavi was
longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award 2011.
