How to Paint a Dead Man
Synopsis
Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles.
Not long afterwards, a blind girl tends his grave, trying to understand the world she can no longer see, and wondering whether the presence she feels nearby is the ‘Bestia’, the monstrous creature depicted in the altar of painting of her local church.
In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - who once wrote letters to the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous.
And in present-day London, his daughter, struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon.
Author Biography
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 short-listed for the Man Booker prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region), and the Prix Femina Etranger, and was long-listed 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, and was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction.
Her fourth novel, How to Paint a Dead Man, was published in June 2009.
Her work has been translated into many languages. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a radio adaptation of her third novel.
