Conville & Walsh Ltd

BOTTLES
Sarah Hall
Praise for THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2004
Shortlisted for the Prix Femina 2004
Here is a writer of heart-stopping genius
– GUARDIAN
Conville & Walsh Ltd
Fiction
Hall is a writer to indulge, and her sensuous, poetic prose is every bit as evocative as sand poured from a pocket
at the end of a holiday
– DAILY MAIL
Influenced by the paintings of Giorgio Morandi and the early writings of Camus, and written with a
passionate understanding for the grand artistic follies and small-scale, un-catalogued triumphs of men
and women, this novel is a wise exploration of the existential, of human emotion and endeavour.
Italy, in the early 1960s: a reclusive painter dying from lung cancer considers the sacrifices and losses
that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last Still-Life
painting, using the same objects that he has for the entire span of his career – a small group of
bottles.
Not long afterwards a local blind girl tends his grave, trying to understand the world that she can no
longer see, and wondering whether the presence she feels nearby is God or the Devil.
In Cumbria, 30 years later, a young art student – who received letters from the Italian recluse – is a
painter and eccentric himself, as well as a husband and father, but he has reached a point in life
where reality and imagination have begun to bleed together.
And in London, now, a woman struggles to cope with the sudden loss of her twin brother as she
curates an exhibition of artists’ personal effects.
Covering half a century, collecting together several unusual narratives, portraits and ideas, and
tracking the strange journey of one of the original still-life bottles, this fierce novel is about people
and art, about how we are consoled and draw meaning from our lives, and about the legacies we
choose to make.
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974 and lived there until she left home at the age of 18 to study
for a degree in English and art history at Aberystwyth University. She took a master’s degree in
creative writing a few years later at St Andrews University and stayed on for a year to teach in the
university’s undergraduate creative-writing programme. Her first novel, HAWESWATER, was published
by Faber in 2002 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. Her second novel,
THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO, also published by Faber, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker
Prize.
UK Publisher Faber
Delivery Autumn 2006
UK Publication Spring 2007
Length 80,000 words
Agent CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
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