Sudden Traveller: Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award

Description

Sudden Traveller is Sarah Hall's third story collection. Featuring her signature themes of identity, eroticism, and existential quest, these new stories travel far afield in location and ambition. From Turkish forests to rain-drenched Cumbrian villages, Hall's characters walk, drive, dream, and fly, trying to reconcile themselves with their journeys through life, death, and love. Science fiction meets folktale and philosophy meets mortality. A woman with a new generation of pacemaker chooses to shut it down in the Lakeland, the site of her strongest memories; a man repatriated in the near east hears the name of an old love called and must unpack history's dark suitcase; from the new world-waves of female anger and resistance, a mythical creature evolves; and in the woods on the border between warring countries, an old well facilitates a dictator's downfall, before he gains power. In what has become her most powerful form of narration, Hall opens channels in the human mind and spirit and stands with the reader at the very edge of our possible selves.

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. Twice nominated for the Man Booker prize, she is the award-winning author of five novels and two short-story collections - The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes, and Madame Zero, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, and winner of the East Anglian Book Award. She is currently the only author to be three times shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, which she won in 2013 with 'Mrs Fox'.