Edith, the narrator, is an acclaimed sculptor, now in her late 50s, and is recalling a time 20 years before when a catastrophic virus hit Britain. She spent much of the consequent lockdown holed up with her Turkish lover Halit – and much of that time in bed, which is described in graphic, sometimes unpleasant and quite unnecessary detail. This, I’m afraid, alienated me. Having just lived through our own lockdowns due to Covid, I felt that to concentrate solely on sex was not just distasteful but irrelevant. Yes, the wider world impinges – food shortages etc – but essentially Edith and Halit live in their own solipsistic world until the virus catches up with them. And the effects of the virus are equally graphically described, again unnecessarily so in my opinion. Now the virus in the novel isn’t Covid, so there is no need to keep to reality, but publishing the novel at this moment (Oct 2021) jarred with me. As Edith reflects on her life now that the virus has finally caught up with her, we get to know her backstory, and certainly her progression as an artist is interesting, but I never warmed to her. The writing is overblown, with a strange choice of vocabulary at times (tannicly) and the fragmentary non-linear nature of the book can be disorientating. All in all, not a book I particularly enjoyed.

A new Sarah Hall novel is always a treat - a well written tale with strong sense of place and told through the perspective of a woman who, whatever she may think, is one of strength and vision. Edith in this tale has been told by her mother Naomi that “those who tell stories survive” – so especially at a time of pandemic a book like this will be of particular importance. This story will gradually reveal increasing details and depths, rather as a private person slowly shares things of importance with a friend. So this is an extraordinary and evocative read, undoubtedly one of the finest books of the year.
Mother Naomi had suffered a life changing stroke at an early age that affected her memory and speech. Living with her in an isolated upland cottage life is not easy even before Edith’s father leaves. But Edith and Naomi negotiate a not always easy life together and Edith will develop both as a woman and as an artist. Just as her mother will try to rebuild her creative writing life. But her mother provides an essential security to her life and an example of a woman’s love and strength. After her death Edith will win a scholarship to Japan and be apprenticed to a sculptor who works in the ancient tradition of deep burning wood. This creates not just an exceptionally beautiful outside, but a tempered, extra strong, and long living centre. She will use the technique as part her increasingly internationally commissioned public sculptures. These will be created in her refurbished canal-side industrial building “Burntcoat”, her home and centre.
But this is the time of pandemic. Hall’s one carries many similarities to the present one, but also a greater strength and impact to the disease. The government and public responses will be longer lived and more extreme as social life starts to fail. The disease kills more people. At the time of Edith’s recounting for the novel she is belatedly completing the national memorial to the dead of the pandemic. Why has it taken so long? Shortly before lockdown she had met a new lover a man who had turned into the love of her life – and although as a Kurd raised in an entirely different country and culture - her kindred spirit. But the impact of the pandemic is extensive, not kind, and seemingly random as to who lives and dies.
Edith will recognise that it might be her early life of difficulties and loss that allowed her to survive the lock down, loss and isolation. But why would she wish to complete the memorial work if in her own mind, the pandemic is not really over and still lives on in people’s altered lives? The reader will thus have to address these key questions too. It all adds another reality to one’s perspective as some apparently “go back to normal life” easily as the number of others (not all elsewhere) sicken and die.
This novel is about the inner places of a woman’s mind – as a family member, friend and artist. Many women over the last year or so may have been moved and lived deeper in these places and for longer as isolation has been required. If so this might not be an entirely comfortable read - and the emphasis on longer term impacts make it even harder. But Edith’s survival after her own fashion and her ability to finally return to the messages of her art may be reassuring.

Beautifully written and poetic - a haunting novella for pandemic times. Love and loss, family and art, a very intense read.

Naomi couldn't fit in the suitable hole, she was asked to hide but she couldn't. Hall's use of Art as a reminder of the primal, of the wild, of the us we are made to hide is something to read. Maybe that is why we need to make and have art in our lives because it exposes the hidden, the other perspectives which we so need to survive with our sanity intact.

Hall puts this duel between the wild and 'civilised' self to the test. And oh what a test, Pandemic anyone. So what happens to all our self agonising when we come up against a virus that does not give a hoot what our name is or what we want to do. First things first, we fight to survive, it might be that we have to fight this fight all alone and yes die alone like so many did and continue to do because of Covid19. What do we cling to? What helps us make it through?

My first Sarah Hall. I find that I like her or let us say her writing touches me. She writes about the wild stuff. Of us untamed, feral. And yes guess who needs a Hecky in her life, I do, I do. Such a great creation, I would love to see her.

This book is gorgeously written, somehow stark and brutal yet also intimate and sensual at times. I never thought I’d want to read a novel about a pandemic after the year and a half we’ve had, but this book changed my mind.

Something about Sarah Hall’s work always makes me think of autumn. In the case of Burntcoat, it’s the protagonist’s, Edith’s, art, which involves sculpting from wood using burning techniques she learnt in Japan, so the wood can bear the weather better. Edith describes the process:

'There was incredible skill to it – collapsing the cell walls to strengthen the wood, preserving its integrity while enhancing its beauty. Too much heat and the piece was ruined, too little and the wood wasn’t sealed, could not achieve the finish. Shun called this experience. The wood is experiencing fire now. It will be improved.'

This passage could serve as an epigraph for the whole book, which darts between Edith’s past and her present. In the present, she is nearing the end of her life, living with the aftereffects of the novavirus, a pandemic that ravaged the world several decades ago. In the past, she faces the pandemic in isolation with her lover, and remembers her mother’s struggle back to life after a brain haemorrhage. I found this all strongly reminiscent of some of the Nina Allan short stories I recently read, especially ‘Neptune’s Trident’, ‘Flying in the Face of God’, and ‘Four Abstracts’. Hall has the same knack as Allan of creating imaginary art that feels so real you almost believe it exists – next time I’m at Scotch Corner, I’ll expect to see Edith’s witch – and she’s also interested in those outcast by illness and dealing with its effects on their body.

I’ve read everything Sarah Hall has written, and her uncompromising, vivid prose is in full force in Burntcoat. I found her last collection of short stories, Madame Zero, somewhat disappointing, so for me this felt like a return to form, and I was glad to see her publish a longer work again. While this was not as distinctive and memorable for me as my favourite Hall, The Carhullan Army, it’s still a highly original take on a theme that was familiar in fiction long before coronavirus: how we survive mass illness and death, and what is left if we do.

Creation, Re-creation and Destruction.

A virus spreads worldwide, causing the collapse of society and killing all infected. Nearing the end of her life, sculptor Edith looks back at her feverish affair with immigrant Halit.

This short, visceral novel has tremendous drive. With arresting images, it highlights the link between illness and creativity. The broken narrative flits with Edith’s memory across time and characters.

Never shy of writing about sex, here Hall is so up close and personal as to give the sticky impression of wading in bodily fluids.

Frenzied pandemic fiction.

There’s no doubt that I was drawn to this book by its thoroughly intriguing and beautiful cover. I love literary novels every so often and I was drawn in by this dark, beguiling story.

Edith is a successful sculptor when the virus arrives for her. Like the rest of the world, she decides to retreat to her beautiful studio in Burntcoat, an enormous warehouse. It was here that she spent the first lockdown with her lover Halit, when the virus first took hold. With nothing but reflections and memories of the times before, Edith works on her greatest masterpiece yet while waiting for the inevitable.

This is a pandemic novel and there are many aspects of Edith’s world that are shared in ours. However, Edith seems to have lived with these regulations and precautions for decades and sadly, that’s perhaps a realistic view of what’s in store for us. There is a sense of quiet foreboding running throughout the book and that fits in with the bleak themes perfectly.

Burntcoat itself isn’t a beautiful, charismatic presence but it does seem to have a certain charm. Edith chooses to shelter in it from the harshness of the world outside and that very act tells the reader that the place possesses security and perhaps even comfort for her. It’s where she has created her life’s work and where some of the biggest, most significant, life events have occurred. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book with a setting quite like Burntcoat but it was a welcome, refreshing backdrop.

I was very interested in the methods that Edith uses in her work. She reflects on how she learned Shou Sugi Ban, a wood burning technique in Japan, and how the process relate to her life. The idea of seemingly destroying something only to improve it fascinates me and I loved how the theme of wood burning as an art form was used to parallel the idea of self-growth and development.

Edith’s relationship with her mother is also touched upon and she’s able to see it in a different life now that she’s older. She grew up believing that her mother was unnecessarily critical and difficult but it’s only when she’s around her mother’s own age that she can see there was never any malice there. This is a revelation that many people, particularly women, experience and more often than not, it’s reached too late to apologise or make amends for any ill-treatment or misunderstanding. I know that so many readers will be able to see themselves in Edith, even if it’s only for this very thing, so Hall has done an amazing job at creating a very believable and perceptive woman.

There are some graphic descriptions of Edith’s sex life with Halit and what that relationship really means for her. Halit is a Turkish waiter and although she actually barely knows him, he represents a whole new world for her. The fact that he’s from a different culture and has different ideals is exciting and as a result, she believes she’s madly in love with him. Perhaps he is the closest thing to love that she has ever had but the surface-level nature of their bond meant that the emotion she professed wasn’t exactly convincing to me.

Burntcoat is ultimately about grief, loss, rebirth and resilience in a world that constantly tries to beat you down. It’s told in a non-linear structure, which is somewhat confusing at the start but once you realise what it’s trying to do, it becomes clearer. Although it was an interesting glimpse into a dying woman’s life, I think I wanted a little more from the story itself. It’s very dark, atmospheric and transporting, which is exactly what you want from an autumnal read.

I surprised myself by falling headlong into this pandemic novel at this particular time, but its stark intensity was compelling. The ideas about, art, sex and sickness are woven into a story and setting that we know from the beginning is hopeless, which somehow makes it easier to read and not harder. Edith grew up with a mother who was disabled by a stroke (her father abandoned her soon after when she refused to leave with him), and this relationship shapes Edith into adulthood. Despite the subject matter, this is not a depressing book - yes, there is some deep sadness in it (and harrowing descriptions of illness and the breakdown of society as the virus takes hold), but the love story at it centre between Halit and Edith is somehow life affirming despite everything.

Edith, a celebrated sculptor, is dying from the long-term effects of the virus that swept through the country causing mass deaths years before. She looks back on her life, including her chaotic childhood with her brilliant but brain-damaged mother, her struggles to find herself as a woman and an artist, and her sensual affair with Halit, a refugee restaurant owner with whom she falls deeply in love and finds brief happiness before the virus forces them to take refuge in Burntcoat, the dilapidated building which Edith took over and converted to a giant studio for her work. A very emotional read and frequently harrowing, the portrayal of the pandemic is visceral and brutal, but the overall message I took from it was that the human will to survive is powerful. Like the technique of burning wood to strengthen it and bring out the beauty that Edith learns in Japan, her experiences do not destroy her- both she, and the legacy of her art, will endure.

Sarah Hall: Burntcoat

Sarah Hall is, in my view, one of the foremost English novelists writing today. I suspect that she does not get the attention she deserves because she is from the North of England and her books are set, at least in part, in the North of England. This one is no different for, though our heroine makes brief excursions to Japan and Thailand and has friends and a lover from other countries, it still remains a Northern England novel.

This book has another interesting feature. It is a pandemic novel but one seemingly written after the arrival of covid and therefore influenced by what happened during the covid era in the UK and elsewhere. It is not covid. It is called variously novavirus, AG3 and other titles. It is seemingly more virulent than covid and one of its symptoms seems to be Black Death-type lesions on the body. At the beginning of the book, our heroine, Edith Harkness, by then fifty-nine, seems to have the long covid equivalent of it, though this long version is often fatal.

Edith is the only child of Naomi and Adam. Both are in the arts. Edith is a successful novelist. Adam runs the local playhouse. One day when Edith was ten and the three of them are out, Naomi stumbles and cannot get up and cannot see. She has had an aneurysm. She does survive but the aneurysm has a profound effect on her. As Edith says, she lost a mother and got Naomi instead.

Naomi has changed and she struggles to readapt and reconnect with the world. Her speech is defective and sometimes no-one can understand what she says. She also is also, not surprisingly, often forgetful, and careless and struggles to relearn how to live. Adam finds this very trying and decides to leave. He wants to take Edith but she is sticking by her mother.

Can Naomi cope? A social worker is sent round to watch over them but the pair, more or less, cope. Naomi sells the house and she buys a remote cottage and the two get on with life. As she grows up, it is clear Edith wants to be an artist and not just an ordinary artist but an artist who builds monumental structures that are displayed in public arenas.

We follow her career from her first effort – building a large ship in her mother’s garden – to art school from going to Japan to learn shou sugi ban, a Japanese technique of charring timber for artistic effect, to Hecky (her nickname for it), known as the Scorch Corner Witch, a monumental shou sugi ban statue near the road at Scotch Corner, and clearly inspired by (though very differnt from) Antony Gormley‘s Angel of the North.

With the money she makes (a lot) she buys Burntcoat, a disused warehouse which she converts into a combined living space and huge studio for her work. We meet her aged fifty-nine early in this book and she is engaged what will be her final monumental work.

We have followed her early life with her mother, not always easy but one the two manage to get through, and her art. However, as mentioned there is a third element – the pandemic. While living in Burntcoat, she goes to a small restaurant with her two girlfriends and there she meets the chef/owner. He is called Halit, has a Russian name but is clearly Turkish (using both Turkish words and mentioning Turkish places). They start a relationship and this seems to be the most important relationship of her life. However, the pandemic breaks out and we follow both the wider development of the pandemic (the UK prime minister is a woman – it is not clear whether Hall has left Theresa May in power or has just invented an arbitrary woman prime minister). Things get out of hand even more than they did with covid.

Hall beautifully mixes in Edith’s artistic aspirations and work, her struggles with her mother and the pandemic. In many ways it is a feminist novel – as mentioned even the UK prime minister during the pandemic gets a sex change – with the struggles of Edith and Naomi (and Adam’s abandonment of his wife and daughter), and most of the women being seen in a positive light, coping with life, while most (but certainly not all) of the men behaving somewhat badly. However, you do not have to read it as a feminist novel; it is much more than that – a love novel, an art novel, a pandemic novel, above all a novel about people and their aspirations facing real life with its myriad problems.

Firstly I would like to thank Netgalley, the author and publisher for my ARC.

This is a book of our time from the perspective of an artist. Beautifully written, sometimes other worldly, but glittering with imagination and emotion, this is the story of Edith, who knows that she is now not long for the world.

I recommend this book for dark afternoons and moonlight nights.

This is a rather wonderful understated depiction of loss, full of ellipses and gaps for the reader to fill in. It opens with artist Edith Harkness making her final preparations at the age of 59 as the virus which has been lying dormant in her system since a devastating pandemic returns to finish its deadly work.

The Burntcoat of the title is her living and working space, a vast warehouse overlooking a river where all her adult memories reside - love, achievement and loss. It also alludes to her sculpting technique, which involves creating huge pieces of public art out of wood which is given strength and durability by means of a Japanese technique of careful burning of the surface, a kind of speeded-up fossilization process.

Damage is a running theme throughout the novel. As a child, she is brought up in relative isolation on the edge of a moor by a mother who has suffered a massive brain haemorrhage and has to relearn how to speak, to walk, to negotiate the world again. The way she puts it is, 'When I was eight, my mother died and Naomi arrived', a neat way of summing up how such a catastrophic event changes a personality so completely that it might as well be a different person. The great love of her life, Halit, is an immigrant with a Moslem as well as a Western name; a refugee from a divided country with roots in both cultures. And delicately, understatedly, the thread of the pandemic underscores the narrative, creating a before-and-after world and a divided population of those who managed to avoid the disease for two years until a vaccine was available, and those who did not. The people who survived the first deadly round - relatively few - were merely living on borrowed time until the resurgence of the disease which killed with a fever so high their organs disintegrated.

Talking about her work, at one point Edith says, 'There is the art, the item, or the concept. And there is the story of the art, which is not its interpretation, not its meaning'. This is true of the novel itself - it is a story, elliptical and fragmented, dealing with events and feelings but leaving the interpretation to us, the readers. A story of loss, but also a testimony to human resilience in the face of tragedy: we love, create, re-learn, rise again, until death takes us.

This is a beautiful and unusual novel, one to read slowly and mull over and revisit bits of. Highly recommended.

This was an intriguing and quick read.

Burntcoat is the home of Edith Harkness, dying artist - and the narrative tells the story of the key moments in her life and the remarkable characters who are part of her tale particularly Naomi, her mother, brutally changed by an accident and Halit, her lover, as she nurses him through his demise.

The world is in the grip of a deadly virus - might seem a topical issue, but this isn't all about Covid - which is a backdrop to need for Edith to impart her story.

Unusual and intriguing, I enjoyed this.

Burntcoat is a sensual and exhilarating novel of mortality, passion and human connection, set against the backdrop of a deadly global pandemic in which we are starkly reminded about the vastly underestimated power of art and love to light the way during times of crisis; and it is Hall’s first novel in several years. You were the last one here before I closed the door of Burntcoat. Before we all closed our doors. In an unnamed Northern British town, the virus is spreading, and like everyone else, celebrated sculptor and recent retiree 59-year-old recluse Edith Harkness retreats inside. She isolates herself in her immense studio, known as Burntcoat, with Halit, the lover she barely knows. As life outside changes irreparably, inside Burntcoat Edith and Halit find themselves undergoing the same profound changes: by the histories and responsibilities each carries and bears, by the fears and dangers of the world outside and by the progressions of their new and burgeoning relationship. And Burntcoat will be transformed too, into a new and feverish world, a place in which Edith eventually comes to an understanding of how we survive the impossible--and what is left after we have--as well as the hope of thriving going forward.

This is a compelling and wholly original read that surprised me in the sense that it explores loss, grief, remission and our trials and tribulations as human beings in a way that I have never read it touched upon quite like before. A sharp and stunning novel of art and ambition, mortality and connection, Burntcoat is a major work from a hugely underappreciated writer. It is an intimate and vital examination of how and why we create--make art, form relationships, build a life--and an urgent exploration of an unprecedented crisis, the repercussions of which are still years in the learning. A powerful, moving yarn about the importance of staying grounded, loving and living, and with rich prose and incredible description it immerses you in a story that was not only written during our very own pandemic but that examines the cultural, social, political and economic impacts such a crisis can have before ruminating on the issues we have on a more personal, rather than collective, level. It's taut and intense, reflective and passionate, this is a book about connection and transformation. The story of two new lovers confined, it is a sublime and scorching experience, an elegy burning with resistance, which no reader will forget.

There was a lot of this book I really liked but there were also things I didn't quite get on with. Probably more a me thing than anything the author did or didn't do. That said, I did get to the end - albeit skimming over certain scenes that I wasn't mind to fully immerse myself in!
We meet Edith as she is facing the end. Prematurely at a relatively young age but suffering from the after effects of a virus that struck years previously. She is reminiscing about that time, about her childhood, about isolating, about the work she used to do, about her lover Halit. The virus is a bit like covid but nastier and she is still suffering (think long covid) many years later.
It's quite slow paced and, if you're like me, you'll have to really concentrate to keep on top of things as it does flit about in time quite a bit as she recalls different things from her past. The way it is written is almost like you are there, listening to her ramble on, remembering things and going off at a tangent, segueing into another theme. Covering many aspects of her life and times.
It's quite a visual book but I am not a very visual reader so some parts of the book dragged a little for me. I'm not a prude by any means but I did find it quite heavy on the gratuitous sex scenes. Thanking my stars it wasn't an audiobook!
So, all in all, my three star middle of the road reflects my overall experience of liking some but not all parts of the book. Not the most comfortable of reads but then I guess it's probably not the book / author for me. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

This is a fabulous book. I really enjoyed it. Enjoyment is an odd feeling for a novel that deals so interestingly with illness, remission and loss, but it is a thoroughly engaging read. I didn’t expect to enjoy reading about a pandemic—different to Covid but nevertheless it feels like a response to it—because it still feels too soon somehow to get a grasp on how such a global sickness might ripple on into the everyday, but Sarah Hall handles it cleverly. The pandemic of Burntcoat is part and parcel of the whole of the novel, all of Edith’s experience of life and her telling of it.

Just to warn you… there a few spoilers in this review. I tried to keep them out, but it’s tricky to write about this book without them. Look away now if that worries you. Short review is it’s a great read with wonderful intertwining and amassing themes.

Edith is a middle-aged successful artist who creates huge sculptures, not unlike the Angel of the North, but made of wood and burned in a Japanese heat treatment that marks and strengthens the wood, adding to its durability and beauty as an organic, but carefully damaged material. There too, you feel the echoes of the themes of damage and illness as things that can create something different but also stronger and sometimes more beautiful.

She is the daughter of a writer, Naomi, who suffered a brain hemorrhage and was saved by radical surgery that meant she had to relearn everything from walking to talking and writing. Her damaged self was too much for Edith’s father who left them both when Edith refused to leave with him. Edith chose to stay with the woman who needed so much of her help to cope.

Naomi is one of the yous to which the narrative is written. This second person is deliberately slippery. Edith is dying. She is tying the pieces of her life up and she is saying goodbye.

One of the other yous—for undoubtedly the reader is implicated too—is the man she fell for right before the pandemic took hold. A restaurant owner and chef, he moved in with her during isolation. I will say no more about him, as he and their relationship comes so wonderfully to life that I don’t want to spoil it by saying more. Let’s just say that again, this novel explores how brevity and fragility are often important parts of a different kind of immortal beauty. Her lover comes from a family of emigrants and he describes himself as a mix, a wonderful whole that has grown with and from division and loss.

It is this richness of themes and ideas, this thematic coherence, that makes Burntcoat such a pleasure to read. The story is a fascinating one but how all of these concepts, of what it means to be human and to live with mutability, damage, loss and regeneration, work together across the whole is a delight. It’s a brilliant novel. I finished reading it and turned back to the beginning right away. I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t make the prize lists.

Burntcoat intelligently taps into the well of uneasiness of the past 18 months, providing a "what might have been" as the more lethal virus is depicts tears through the population and a new relationship. The novel's first third feels like it is gathering its energies for a vast sweep interlocking various characters and points in time, but once lockdown is underway the story - appropriately enough, perhaps - condenses down into a linear, haunting and ultimately gory tale. Due to the constraints in which Hall depicts the central relationship - sharing a lockdown of only so many weeks together, just after they have met one another - she has attempted to portray the strength of the bond through sex scenes, the explicitness of which won't be to everyone's tastes. A hard-hitting, well-written read.

Sarah Hall's writing is so powerful that, as for her previous books, I found myself pausing in my reading at times, just to reread a sentence that sounded so beautiful and rang so true. At first glance, the subject matter of Burntcoat can appear unremarkable: an artist raised by a mother who had suffered from brain damage has a passionate love story with a man before their life is turned upside down by a global pandemic. But it is precisely the supposed unremarkability of these themes (messed-up childhood, illness, love, global health crisis) that makes Burntcoat so forceful. Not only is it easily relatable because it's close to home, but Sarah Hall's visceral use of langage and images makes you feel what her protagonist is experiencing through your very bones. Burntcoat is to me the best kind of fiction, i.e. poetry in prose.

In an unnamed British city, a virus is spreading out of control and everyone is obeying government orders to stay at home. Our narrator, Edith seeks refuge in her artist's studio - Burntcoat - with her new lover, Halit. Travelling between flashbacks of her unusual childhood with her mother somewhere in the North of England; her tutelage with a Japanese sculptor and the present day (some thirty years after she originally contracted Novavirus and is relapsing), we learn more about Edith and Halit as they discover each other through the enforced proximity of lockdown.

This is an incredibly powerful and at times unsettling novel, filled with beautiful prose and imagery. The descriptions of wood (Edith's medium of choice for her artwork) are vivid and I could imagine the feel of the bark and the smell as she uses fire to create the shapes and textures she desires for her sculptures. The theme of creation, of life coming from death echoes throughout, along with different kinds of 'burning' - from the fire Edith uses for her Shou Sugi Ban creations; foreheads hot from fighting off a virus in the body; the mad desire for a new lover.

The writing was absorbing and had me gripped from the very start - the sense of imminent threat from inside and without, and catastrophe drawing nearer had me turning the pages and reading every spare moment. Burntcoat is the first pandemic novel that I have read and I didn't know if I would be ready for it, but it was such a beautiful piece of writing that I am glad I tried it. It is a dark and intense story and will stay with me for a long time. I'd be willing to put a bet on Burntcoat being shortlisted for the Booker 2022 and the Women's Prize...