Burntcoat by Sarah Hall is a difficult novel to review.

On the one hand, it’s a beautifully written book about the life of a sculptor who as a child deals with her mother’s brain injury and as an adult deals with the effects of a deadly viral pandemic. On the other hand, the non-linear narrative is confusing and the very graphic sex scenes are a bit too strong for this (slightly prudish) reader.

An intense, visceral and challenging read that I’m sure will gain many enthusiastic readers and prize nominations.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

This is the second ‘covid’ novel that I’ve read and is definitely the better one, though it isn’t an easy read, but any effort required is worth it.
It is the story of Edith, an artist who creates large constructions in her warehouse named Burntcoat, and Emily who is hiding from a deadly virus (much more deadly than cofid) that is sweeping the world. There are multiple narratives and the narrative is not straightforward. Occasionally this jarred, it felt as if complications were unnecessary, but overall it is an excellent, if demanding novel.

A short novel, disturbing and intoxicating, enthralling and hard to follow at times.
It's not an easy read and it's not entertaining, it's one of those book that makes you think and I will read it again to see if I got the same impression.
It could be the first great novel about the pandemic we are living.
Great style of writing and excellent character development.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

While Burntcoat is set against the backdrop of a pandemic (but not quite this pandemic exactly), it’s much more than that – a story of love, both romantic and familial. It is Edith’s story, giving glimpses of her childhood, her work, her relationships.
I like that the reader has to do a little work in fathoming out who’s who and to whom Edith is referring; it’s work that is rewarded with beautiful language and heartbreaking moments. Edith’s thoughts on being away from home for too long, ‘of being unplugged and too far from the socket’, exactly match my own.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Sarah Hall’s writing so it’s surprising that it’s taken me this long to read anything of hers. On the basis of the compelling Burntcoat, I’ll be reading more.

An intoxicating and sweeping look at identity, family, and isolation - while I've read many middling, skippable "Covid novels", this is an essential one to pick up.

I have read a couple of Sarah Hall’s previous novels and not quite gelled with them. For some reason I was seduced by Burntcoat’s cover and some of the spruiks from writers I respect. I went for it, but perhaps I should have run with my head, not my heart.

Burntcoat is the oddly named converted warehouse used by internationally renowned artist Edith Harkness. Edith constructs major public art projects and is working on The Witch, an iconic motorway installation that might be a Scottish version of The Angel of the North – made out of burnt wood, rising from the bushes. Yes, I know. The mental image of a woman rising from the bushes does not immediately make me think of witchcraft, but perhaps I have been on too many overland holidays. This art construction project involves techniques from Japan, burning the wood to preserve it.

Meanwhile, Emily shares her space with Halit, a Turkish kitchen worker, and together they shield from a deadly virus that is sweeping the world and is definitely not Covid. A million Britons will die – some from the fever and some from the residual aftereffects. Long Notcovid. And she reminisces of a past love called Ali, and a childhood marked by the illness of her mother Naomi.

All this is told in a fragmentary way with non-linear narratives. For the most part, the actual narrative is lucid, but there are digressions into metaphysics that never felt worth unravelling. Sometimes this fragmentary style can be used to great effect, gradually building a complete picture. Other times it just feels like hiding a story that doesn’t cohere, hiding details for the sake of it. So here, for example, the author goes to great lengths to delay the reveal that Halit is Turkish, although frequent use of Turkish will give that away for those who recognise the language. Except, for some reason, he is also half Bulgarian. Or leaving it for some time to reveal that Ali is short for Alistair rather than being of Arabic origin – I mean, why? Or being intentionally unspecific about the geographic location.

There are redeeming features. Some of the individual scenes are well constructed. Ali’s doorstep tantrum, perhaps. Edith’s slightly strange relationship with her mother. Plus, most mercifully, Burntcoat is short. Overall, though, there is just this sense that Burntcoat is trying too hard to be arty without too much real substance behind it.

An intense pandemic / covid novel, a life and lockdown in retrospect narrated by an artist with a pretty withering opinion of the art world although driven to make her colossal 'burnt' art pieces. Allso a lockdown romance with a lot of torrid yet steamy and graphic sex. Exquisite writing. No happy endings.

This was a visceral affecting read, full of humanity and horror. The first novel I've read that has tackled the pandemic (or rather a side-ways, what if, glance) that only added to its urgency.

This is the most exquisitely haunting story I’ve read in a long time.

Edith Harkness, a renowned sculptor, is living her last days and is reflecting on her life. Edith recalls when she was a young girl, her mother suffered a brain aneurysm and how it altered their life trajectory. To the days when she learned art techniques that would eventually lead her to win awards and more wealth than she knew how to comprehend. To the days when the world shut down, when she and her new love, Halit, went into lockdown together.

This story centres around a COVID-like virus; however, the virus presented here is more severe and the public’s response slightly more dangerous. Edith contracted the virus when it was first circulating, and now some thirty years later is suffering a relapse. The cause of her relapse is unknown to scientists, but what is definite is that Edith does not have long to live. As Edith reminisces on her life, she completes the finishing touches on her magnum opus, knowing that she will never see its final installation.

This is a slowly-paced literary work that captured my attention from its opening sentence. The timeline skips around as Edith recalls different instances, but it gets less confusing as the novel progresses. I’d recommend reading it in one or two sittings in order not to be thrown off by the time skips.

There are themes on desire, love, lust, art, family, grief, and sickness.

I knew I would like this book, but I didn’t think I would LOVE it. I also didn’t know it would be so seductive and intense, but I am not complaining, not at all. The story goes to some very dark places. It steers clear of toxic romantically dark places but explores rather grim and isolated ones that can get quite graphic.

I won’t say more than that because I want this story to tear through the hearts of other readers.

This was my first Sarah Hall book, but it will not be my last.

Thank you to Faber and Faber for the arc provided via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is really quite an intense read. The story is quite intense which I think is a reflection of Edith’s life and the way her life has unfolded even the sex scenes are quite intense. This is definitely the kind of book you really need to be in the right mood to read as it is quite close to home at times and was hard to read in places.

This is the story of a modern artist who makes installations such as we see in the Turner prize. She wins a major prize and with her winnings buys Burntcoat, a disused warehouse which she makes into her studio. She had a strange childhood which she refers to constantly. Then an extremely severe pandemic/plague strikes, which is handled badly by the government. There are graphic descriptions of sex and illness. To be honest, I was glad the book was short as I did not enjoy it at all. There is not much of a story, speech is written in italics which I found annoying, and I could not connect with the artist or her art. It was all vey depressing!

Maybe it's too soon after the pandemic to fully appreciate it but found this subject matter a little jarring. Beautifully written and no doubt could be one of the classics about this time. The characters were well-drawn and the settings are evocatively drawn. For a short novel, it seemed longer in its scope and stays with the reader long after the final page.

My thanks to Faber and NetGalley for the ARC

Sarah Hall began writing Burntcoat on the day England first locked down in March 2020. It’s an intense, claustrophobic piece displaying many of the features associated with Hall’s fiction: a strong female protagonist, a northern setting and generous amounts of meticulously-detailed sex. Like Sarah Moss’s The Fell, this is first and foremost a pandemic novel, but it’s edgier, somehow more organic and yet slicker than Moss’s vision of post-Covid society – genteel in comparison to Hall’s. Hall’s story’s narrated by Edith, a successful middle-aged, British sculptor. Edith comes across like a composite of artists like Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin, vulnerable but fiercely feminist, keenly aware of the challenges of being a woman creating art, of the difficulty of negotiating male-dominated spaces. It’s slenderly plotted, although it reminded me at times of Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in the way that information’s drip-fed, elliptical, requiring readers to piece together what’s happening from the narrator’s fragmented offerings.

The novel’s setting’s some version of the real but the circumstances in which a novel virus, AG3, takes hold are far more dramatic - perhaps because its actions and consequences are distilled and filtered via Edith’s experiences. Hall’s imagined virus’s deadlier than Covid-19, it takes hold slowly then quickly spreads in fiery bursts until society’s on the verge of collapse. As usual, Hall doesn’t shirk from making broader political points here: Edith’s account of events parallels England’s handling of Covid although elements are exaggerated for maximum effect. Hall highlights instantly recognisable features through the scenes witnessed by Edith: aggressive racism; rampant individualism and hoarding; street protests and deniers; a collapsing health system presided over by a tottering, ineffectual government, marked by its indecision and cronyism. Edith herself is damaged, a survivor of a difficult childhood and now a marked woman whose body’s harbouring a likely-fatal, post-viral disease. But what preoccupies her is the memory of her fierce, almost visceral connection with Halit, the man she met before the pandemic took hold, the one she locked herself away with when everything started to fall apart. Halit’s a Muslim immigrant, a local restaurant owner, cut off from his home and family, and for Edith a source of mysterious loss and lingering grief.

Burntcoat's a powerfully expressed, lyrical novel that touches on important issues of creativity and how we might process death on such vast scales. What manner of reparation? What forms of art? What kinds of monuments can be built that adequately address the aftermath of astounding loss? These are all relevant, significant questions but perhaps too complex, too ambitious for a novel of this size and nature to properly address. Edith’s character’s an intriguing one but at the same time not entirely convincing, although aspects of Hall’s portrayal of someone dealing with illness and bereavement ring true. Halit, another fugitive from a traumatic past, is a much blurrier figure a little stock, a little too conveniently, obviously other. There’s a tendency too for Edith to express herself via pseudo-philosophical, gnomic observations, which I found slightly overblown and irritating at times. Overall, it’s an interesting, compulsively readable book but not an entirely satisfying one perhaps because it’s trying to tackle far more than it can reasonably handle

Powerfully written but very graphic. Sculptor Edith Harkness is dying of something similar to Long Covid. She lives in Burntcoat, her house in the Lake District and looks back on her life and art, including time with her lover, Halit. As an artist myself, the best bits were learning about the art of burnt wood sculpting. The way the story flips between different timeframes makes it difficult to follow, but is probably meant to convey the confusion brought on by Edith's illness. Over-long sex scenes also spoil it.

This devastating and heartbreaking novel about love, grief, art, set between flashbacks and during a pandemic really hit home the impact coronavirus has had on people and the world.

Sarah Hall writes beautifully to convey so much emotion throughout the pages. I only wish I could read this book over and over for the first time. I think this is a book that I will be thinking of for a long time to come.

I've avoided Covid-art for the most part, so I don't know why I jumped for this, but I did. Maybe the beautiful cover or the evocative title swayed me. Anyway, whatever it was, I'm grateful for it.

This is truly beautifully written, intense, feverish, and huge in scale. It could feel claustrophobic but it doesn't - it's wide ranging and open hearted. I desperately want to see the works of art that the narrator creates, and see the results of the techniques she learns as a voracious student.

That said, there's no denying that this is a depressing tale. Death is predatory, ubiquitous and shockingly graphic; love is doomed.

The odd discrepancies between the novel's virus (AG3) and ours are a little frustrating, though I'm not sure why that should be. Life inspires art, there's nothing to say it needs to match its muse perfectly. Perhaps it is so close in timing and atmosphere that the little discrepancies jar more than they would otherwise.

I loved the art, the love story, the parts set in Japan, the parts about the narrator's mother. I'm not sure I could have read much more, but I wish it was longer.

My thanks to Faber & Faber and NetGalley for the ARC.

There will no doubt be many pandemic novels. This is the second one that I've read and neither has been an easy read, although each has used the pandemic context to explore characters lives in different ways.
This is, at heart, the biography of an artist, Edith. She is a sculptor and makes monumental pieces of public art, using a technique of dealing with wood that she learned in Japan. I found the parts about art and its creation fascinating and beautifully written. The pieces she created are brought to life more vividly than the novel's characters. We learn what has shaped the artist - her life with her mother, a famous writer who suffers and recovers from a devastating stroke; later, her brief life with her kind, gentle lover and his devastating death from the virus. And we watch her apparent recovery but slow death.

I'm not sure that this book really needed the pandemic context, although readers will have shared the experience to a greater or lesser degree which does bring the book's world closer. I found the account of the creative process to be far more important. Writing about visual art - and especially about its creation - is a challenge for most authors: here it is achieved magnificently.

Thanks to Faber and Netgalley for the ARC

“Do stories make sense of a disordered world? Perhaps Naomi was saying that life is only an invention, a version necessary for us to accept living”.

“There is art, the item, or the concept. And then there is the story of art, which is not its interpretation or its meaning”

Scarred, charred, damaged but revealing its hidden beauty: such is the wood in the Japanese art of shou sugi ban. Such are our lives and our world, as the pandemic has laid bare our own fragility and the one of our entire civilization. Edith is a 59-year-old artist dying from the long-term consequences of a virus contracted during a global pandemic, which is inspired by COVID but more catastrophic in scope. She lives in her loft studio, a former industrial building symbolically named Burntcoat, and practices the art of shou sugi ban to produce monumental sculptures, the latest being a tribute to the victims of the pandemic. Pay attention, and you’ll see that incendiary images constellate the text.

In this elegiac novel she looks back onto her life, to her bohemian youth, her artistic beginning and the making of Burntcoat, but in particular to her mother Naomi, a writer who was permanently damaged by a stroke and with whom she ‘grew round each other like vines that needed mutual support” and to her relationship with Halit, the lover of Bulgarian-Turkish origins with whom she had retreated in Burntcoat at the start of the pandemic even if she did not know him that well.

With impassionate, sympathetic gaze, Hall crafts a superb novel exploring the human condition
- our mortality and a desire for connection - in a time of trouble -- bodies and society slowly disgregating, immortalized in the process, and desperately wanting to connect and hold on to each other. Through her experiences and the pandemic, Edith learns “the lessons of impermanence and resilience”, yet she “finds no solace” in the knowledge of our being mortal bodies that yearn.

This knowledge informs Edith’s sculpture: for example, she is told that her art is “very strong meat”, quasi pornographic, certainly erotically charged (Oddly, a few reviewershere on GR have commented on the gratuitousness of sex in this book). Edith explains that this is because her work is “not supposed to be mystical” but well grounded in the materiality and sensuality of bodies that her (and Hall’s) unflinching gaze takes in. As a sign of our insignificance (our being “ready-mades” rather than “self-made” conquerors of the world), human traits dissolve in her art, which “arises from the flames” like a statement, a sublimated portrait of who we are in an exhausted world.

The pandemic in the novel is harsher and more long-lasitng than the COVID one, which allows Hall to jump back and forth in time and explore the long-term consequences of the pandemic at societal level.

A splendid response to the pandemic and our times, which reminded me of The Sheltering Sky and Wender’s Until The End Of The World and of the voice in Rachel Cusk’s novels, especially Second Place (narrator talking to a “you”). Wonderfully written, but not always easy to follow because of the shifts in time.
Strangely, I have jusr read it after The Passing of The Forms That We Have Loved, another variation on the theme of love and death and seeing someone pass.

4.5 rounded up
My thanks to the publisher for an ARC of Burntcoat via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

In the recent slew of covid novels, this is the first that will become a classic, read for years to come. Every page is as dense with beauty and meaning as a poem, but the writing never drags. A heartbreaking story about what humans can endure and the things that pull us through the darkest times. Just stunning .

Burncoat by Sarah Hall



Not the longest of books , but one that will remain with me for a long time.
I've read most of Sarah's books and I like the way they often incorporate Cumbria , which is where I live. Stark , remote , at times awe inspiring , bleak , lonely , for me descriptions that for this title also.
It's about a person , Edith , who is just about surviving a pandemic which sounds more horrific that the one we are currently experiencing.
It's also about her mother , Edith had to cope with her mother having a stroke when she was still a young girl and the horrors that brought.
Sarah Hall manages to get under the skin of Edith as she reflects on people from her life now dead , those that are struggling as she is , and those that are trying to help her recover.
Not a joyous book by any mark , but one that makes you realise that hope , and the determination to carry on right to the end for better days are in us all .