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The Carhullan Army
- Author: Sarah Hall
- Category: Fiction Literary
- Publisher: Faber
- Pub date: 16 August 2007
- Length: 224 pages
About The Carhullan Army
In this stunning novel Sarah Hall draws on the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell to imagine a new dystopia set in the not-too-distant future. England is in a state of depression after global economic collapse: oil and bio-fuels are rationed, electricity is metered and tinned food is shipped over from Christian charities in America. There has been a census and all citizens have now been herded into the urban centres. Terrifying new systems of control are in place; not only has the government created a military police force to monitor the population, but reproduction has become a lottery, with contraceptive coils fitted to every female of child-bearing age.
The Carhullan Army is a final bastion of the seventies’ feminist ideal. A girl who will become known only as ‘Sister’ escapes the confines of her increasingly repressive marriage to find an isolated group of women living as ‘un-officials’ in Carhullan, a remote northern farm. Run by Jackie Nixon, an ex-soldier now turned libertarian, the organization, once considered sexually eccentric and cult-like, has now become something else altogether, and Sister must find out whether she has it in herself to become an active insurgent.
This fascinating novel poses very pertinent questions about ‘feminine instincts and capabilities’, and in a brutalized world it considers what lengths women will go to in order to resist their oppressors, what tactics they must employ to survive and remain free. But the story asks a wider and more difficult question: under what circumstances might you become a terrorist?
The Carhullan Army promises to be both a reminder of the early days of great feminist theory and a fascinating account of ‘what if…?’
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.