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How To Paint A Dead Man
- Author: Sarah Hall
- Category: Fiction Literary
- Publisher: Faber (UK), HarperCollins (US)
- Pub date: 4 June 2009
- Length: 304 pages
About How To Paint A Dead Man
longlisted for the Man Booker prize 2009
winner of the Portico Prize 2010
Susan is a photographer. She has a loving family, a kind and thoughtful boyfriend and a successful career. Everything is perfect, steady and contained until the day her twin brother, Danny, is killed in a road accident. Overwhelmed by grief, locked in profound spiritual and physical agony and consumed by guilt, simply by virtue of the fact that she is still alive, she embarks on a deeply erotic and destructive affair with the husband of her boss and close friend.
As the course of this passionate relationship unfolds, we are drawn into the secret lives of those connected to her past and present, in both familial and tenuous ways, who act as a chorus to Susan’s story. Her father, Peter, is a successful landscape artist – a brash, compulsive ‘northerner’ who, unbeknownst to his family and friends, has had, in his turn, an all-consuming and ultimately tragic relationship. His friend is the famous but increasingly elusive Italian painter, Giorgio, who is accused of fascist tendencies but is haunted by a secret tragedy that has informed his life’s artistic preoccupations. And then there’s Giorgio’s own, most unlikely student, Annette Tambroni, whose blindness gives us a different vision of the world, but whose beauty invites a brutal destiny.
Written in the most startling and sensuous prose, HOW TO PAINT A DEAD MAN moves between past and present, and, through the subtlest of connections, interweaves these narratives together to create extraordinary insights into the places where the creative, emotional and physical worlds meet.
In its universality the novel asserts the centrality of loss and the certainty of grief in all of our lives, but as Susan’s affair reaches its final and unexpected climax it teaches her, and us, how we might live again.
About the Author
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She received a BA from Aberystwyth University, Wales, and a MLitt in Creative Writing from St Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of Haweswater, which won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize.
In 2004, her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region), and the Prix Femina Etranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Her third novel, The Carhullan Army, was published in 2007, and won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC award. It was chosen as one of the Times Best 100 Books of the Decade.
Her fourth novel, How To Paint A Dead Man, was published in 2009. It was longlisted for the Man Booker prize in the same year and won the Portico Prize in 2010. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is working on a fifth novel and a collection of short stories.
Sarah Hall is an honorary fellow of Aberystwyth University, and a fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation (2007). She was a member of Art Council England, North-West region 2008-2009. She regularly tutors for the Faber Academy, the Arvon Foundation, and has taught creative writing in a variety of establishments in the UK and abroad. She currently lives in Cumbria.