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How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.

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A Booker-longlisted novel of art, absence, loss and passion, from Britain´s most exciting contemporary writer.

Moving between Italy and England, the lives of four people intertwine across half a century: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma; a blind girl tries to make sense of a world she can no longer see; a landscape artist finds himself trapped in dangerous terrain, and a young woman embarks on a dangerous affair of darkness and sexual abandon.

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Tour de force in many ways...breathtakingly clever. Then there´s the characterisation which is both bright and deep: each of the characters is distinct, believable, complex, flawed and human... but the best reason for loving this novel is the poetic quality of the prose... [it] was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker prize. Why on earth wasn´t it shortlisted? Independent on Sunday

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Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the prize-winning author of five novels - Haweswater , The Electric Michelangelo , The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man, and The Wolf Border - which have won numerous awards including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and two Man Booker Prize nominations. Hall´s first story collection, The Beautiful Indifference , won the Portico Prize and the Edge Hill prize, and was also shortlisted for the Frank O´Connor Prize. The first story in the collection, ´Butchers Perfume´, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, a prize that Hall won in 2013 with ´Mrs Fox´. Most recently, Hall edited the Faber anthology Sex & Death. She is a fellow at the Royal Society of Literature, and will be a judge for the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the prize-winning author of five novels - Haweswater , The Electric Michelangelo , The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border - as well as The Beautiful Indifference , a collection of short stories. The first story in the collection, ´Butchers Perfume´, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, a prize she won in 2013 with ´Mrs Fox´.

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