Heat plays a major role in the text, as warmth, but also as destructive fire. Compassion is a choice, and it's possible to make it happen - that's a key message of this bleak novel, which is rendered in beautiful, dream-like language. As a storyteller and an artist, Edith struggles to express her experiences and her feelings - and didn't we all during the pandemic? Aesthetically, Hall relies on intense, non-linear vignettes, and interiority, as there is the sphere of Edith, the sphere of Edith and Halit (which we also can't really enter: Edith talks to a "you" that knows much more than we do), and then the public sphere, thus showing the circles that took on new meaning during COVID. Hall's writing is alchemical, magnificent, divine, bodily. Here are new ways to understand what it feels like to be human. Here are books to cherish.BURNTCOAT is a masterpiece. I lay myself at the altarof everything Hall writes.” Hall has crafted a harrowing and memorable vision of decay, collapse and recovery…BURNTCOAT is powerful…Read it tomorrow or a decade from now — either way, it'll convey a palpable sense of what it feels like to be alive in 2021, another grueling year shaped by an epochal crisis.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune

compelling, tragic, and still sensitive in its handling of a love story during a time of terrible social upheaval ... It is immensely readable and beautifully told.'

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Writing Courses at The Grove Hotel near London | Luxury Golf & Spa Resort England". Thegrove.co.uk. 1 January 2000 . Retrieved 2 December 2011. Hall has always written sex well and seriously, has always allowed desire to effloresce even in the most unlikely situations, but now she makes sex the heart of the book, describing it lyrically: “When we pulled apart it felt like drowning. We could only breathe with our mouths held together.” Ultimately, this pandemic will bring out a puritanism in Edith, leaving her asking as little as possible from the world. But in the meantime Halit’s illness offers a kind of terrible but ecstatic consummation of their love. The scenes where the feverish man and the exhausted woman come together in their infected bed have an extraordinary erotic intensity; it is there also in the brutally visceral descriptions of his final decline. “He will do it for me too,” she thinks, after cleaning his mess of body fluids, “and there will be nothing left hidden between us.” The logic of erotic togetherness and the facts of illness conjoin. Stellar and devastating.. … [Hall] writes with a clarity and precision that keeps her books on the short side, but they are dense with feeling, with perfect observations, and with the physicality of life. And Burntcoat is no exception… When I got to the end of BurntcoatI was shaking as if I were sobbing, but there were no tears, just that feeling of being gripped and shaken, everything tied up in knots that take time to relax.”— Tor.com

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. Edith] is the latest in a line of memorable women who have made their presence felt in Hall's fiction ... Hall has written a novel which is, by turn, erotic, tragic and elegiac ... [and] has the power to move and enthral.' But the candor is almost too much. Because Burntcoat is filled with graphic scenes of sex and the physical effects of the virus. Copious amounts of blech are secreted from bodies, enough to sink a boat, and it’s not pretty. It’s gross. Many readers may find the vivid descriptions off-putting. Sarah was Chair of judges for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize 2018, congratulations to Kevin Jared Hosein: www.commonwealthwriters.org In Burntcoat, Hall covers a remarkable amount of ground. The virus is just one focus of a book with many facets: a mother-daughter relationship utterly changed by illness, the thrilling beginnings of a new relationship, the difficulties in creating art in a capitalist society, the need for global change, for the world to stop yearning for more and to instead try and save what it has.

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She tells us of her difficult childhood, when her mother had a stroke and was left permanently brain damaged; of her father’s decision to abandon his wife and child soon after; and of her blossoming Burntcoat tells the story of fictional British sculptor Edith Harkness. The novel is written in Edith’s voice, as she reflects upon her artwork and the impactful relationships of her life. Having lived through a worse-than-COVID pandemic, Edith’s main focus while recounting her tale is the days of the virus and its aftermath, but her narrative encompasses her formative years as well. She has been a member of the Arts Council Northwest region, responsible for investment in the arts.

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? Sarah Hall wins the BBC National Short Story Award". BBC. 8 October 2013 . Retrieved 20 October 2013. The Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlist 2018 has just been announced: www.commonwealthwriters.orgWho that you is, exactly, is one of the gut-punches of Burntcoat , which has many. It’s a simple story: an artist describes moments of her life—an early relationship gone sour, a period of studying abroad, a new love—as she prepares to finish a new work. But everything is undone by the arrival of a virus just as nasty as the one we’re all now so familiar with. There she started an intensely sexual relationship with Halit – a Bulgarian Turk and the two are together when a deadly virus – later known as Nonavirus and then AG3 – sweeps the world causing mass deaths (far more than COVID – around one million in the UK) and huge direct disruption (rather than the indirect chaos wrought by COVID). Her fourth novel, How To Paint A Dead Man,was published in 2009, was long-listed for the Man Booker prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2010.