Madame Zero: stories - Tapa blanda

I can't praise [it] highly enough. (David Mitchell)

Madame Zero is astonishing: humane yet otherworldly, disturbing, sexy and strange. The woman is a genius. (Jessie Burton Guardian Books of the Year 2017)

Sarah Hall is another voice I love. Her new book of short stories, Madame Zero, is a showcase for her clean, vivid style and her surreal, often feral imagination. (Rupert Thomson Guardian Books of the Year 2017)

Great short stories are the shape of themselves: image, voice and plot dovetailed to the chosen form. Hall's stories are vixen-shaped: urban and rural, feral and natural, female and stinky, beautiful and tough. Like Mrs Fox herself, they slide quietly into view and stare at us with their citrine eyes; exceptional, compelling, frightening and authentic. (Book of the Day The Guardian)

Sensual, shape-shifting tales from the alarmingly talented Sarah Hall. (Phil Baker Sunday Times Books of the Year 2017)

Hall looks with frightening believability into dystopian, apocalyptic, and disease-ravaged near futures. Already Booker-shortlisted twice for her novels, Hall is an edgy, sensuous, and immediate writer of striking power and grace. (Phil Baker The Sunday Times)

Stunning ... Hall is as bold with her pen as her character Evie is with her new-found sensuality, there's nothing furtive about these brilliant stories. Each one is a leap into a dark, mysterious void that ultimately reveals glittering terrors therein. (*****) (The Independent)

These powerful stories are dazzling in range and execution. (Mail on Sunday)

The year's short stories tended to the dark and the disturbing: standout collections included Madame Zero, elegant tales of sex, motherhood and transformation. (Justine Jordan The Guardian, Best Fiction of 2017)

Tantalising ... Hall's gamey phrase-making reeks of soil and sweat ... Her most striking images deviate from the general earthiness into something weirder ... Such verbal flights mean that even her most normal scenarios ooze dread ... Hall (a judge of this year's Booker Prize) has won a sackful of awards, but the sense lingers that she somehow still hasn't broken through. If you haven't read her yet, the best of these dark tales are a perfect place to start. (Daily Telegraph)

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 FEATURED IN THE GUARDIAN'S BEST FICTION OF 2017 WINNER OF THE 2018 EDGE HILL READERS' CHOICE AWARD WINNER OF THE EAST ANGLIAN BOOK AWARD She is running and becoming smaller, running and becoming smaller, running in the light of the reddening sun, the red of her hair and her coat falling, the red of her fur and her body loosening. Running. Holding behind her a sudden, brazen object, white-tipped. Her yellow scarf trails in the briar. All vestiges shed. Sarah Hall is an exquisite chronicler of landscapes - rural, industrial, psychological - and these haunting stories reveal a writer at the peak of her powers. Rich in the mythic symbolism of wilderness and wasteland, these tales blur the natural and urban, mundane and surreal, human and animal. Written in Hall's lyrical prose, this uncannily disturbing collection glitters with poetic and erotic imagery. Marked by a fascination with the intimacy of nature - and the nature of intimacy - Madame Zero is a stunning new collection from an author twice nominated for the Booker Prize.