Madame Zero: 9 Stories - Softcover

Sarah Hall, already acclaimed as a prizewinning novelist whose work is “amazing . . . terrifying and original” (Washington Post), is now equally fêted as a radically gifted short-story writer.

A husband’s wife transforms into a canid in “Mrs. Fox,” winner of the BBC National Short Story Award. In “Case Study 2” a social worker struggles with a foster child raised in a commune. A new mother runs into an old lover in “Luxury Hour.” Set in the hinterland between the mundane and surreal, and marked by a fascination with the intimacy of nature—and the nature of intimacy—these nine astonishing stories will resonate long after the final page is turned.

Sarah Hall was born in 1974 in Cumbria, England. She received a master of letters in creative writing from Scotland's St. Andrews University and has published four novels. Haweswater won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (overall winner, Best First Novel) and a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award. The Electric Michelangelo was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Eurasia Region), and the Prix Femina Étranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Daughters of the North won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. How to Paint a Dead Man was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction. In 2013 Hall was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, a prize awarded every ten years, and she won the BBC National Short Story Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.