The Carhullan Army

“A hugely compelling novel of a nightmarish but conceivable future, brilliantly written.”

— Bookseller

Summary

The state of the nation has changed. With much of the country now underwater, assets and weapons seized by the government - itself run by the sinister Authority - and war raging in South America and China, life in Britain is unrecognisable. Most appallingly, in this world of scant resources and hard industrial labour, the Authority insist all women should be fitted with contraceptive devices.

In The Carhullan Army, Sister, as she is known, delivers her story from the confines of a prison cell. She tells of her attempts to escape this repressive world and her journey to join the commune of women at Carhullan, a group living as ‘unofficials’ in a fortified farm beyond the most remote Cumbrian fells. The journey is a challenge, but arrival is only the beginning of her struggle.

A testament to the triumph of the individual in dire circumstances, and a novel of extraordinary imagination, range and emotional complexity, The Carhullan Army has the visionary intensity and quality of great dystopian fiction.

  • Hall was Booker-shortlisted for The Electric Michelangelo, but The Carhullan Army is as gripping - and shocking - a piece of writing as any you will read this year. In all her three novels, Hall has written the landscape almost as if it were another character. Here, the harshness of circumstances are mirrored by the wildness of the moorland in which the women live.

    Tina Jackson, Metro

  • Sarah Hall is garnering a reputation as a strong regional voice with her flavoursome historical fiction. Hall is unflinching, yet sensitive, in her anatomisation of the psychology of survival.

    Rachel Hore, Independent on Sunday

  • Hall's sharp and vivid evocation of landscape has the value of rooting her dark fantasy in a recognisable rural world. The seriousness of Hall's intent and the scale of her achievement are to be highly commended.

    Michael Arditti, Daily Telegraph

  • This is a violent novel, strange and unsettling. It terrifies not because of its vision of a new world but because of its understanding of the cruelty and mess we make of our personal relationships.

    Kathy Watson Novel of the Week, The Tablet

  • Hall’s evocation of place and atmosphere is a joy ... an accomplished, provocative novel. The farm and its community are a triumph of the imagination: you could almost believe the author had lived among them as part of her research. This, combined with the luminosity of the prose casting its light across an emotional and intellectual landscape as bracing as the fells themselves places The Carhullan Army at the vanguard of the new wave of futuristic dystopian literature.

    Martyn Bedford, Literary Review

  • Her work renders the darkest emotional landscapes with a sharp eye and a warm heart. Hall's acidic poetry follows through in The Carhullan Army.

    Mia Hansson, Time Out

  • Though the novel's futurist vision is fascinating and disturbing, there's a whiff of 1970s radical feminism about Sister and her comrades. Hall seems to suggest that if they succeeded in their revolution, they would be repressive in turn.

    Clare Colvin, Daily Mail

  • Her prose is chunky with local language, colour and landscape. Hall makes her survivalist women properly foulmouthed and uncouth. Jackie Nixon herself is a splendid creation, ablaze with the schizoid, lacerating intelligence of a guerrilla messiah, or warrior queen. What she [Hall] has given us is good ... tough, thorny, bloodyminded.

    Colin Greenland, Guardian

  • Here is a dreadfully plausible and absorbing vision of a Britain whose unravelling begins with a deluge of water. With echoes of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and P. D. James's The Children of Men. The novel is, among other things, a meditation on the inequality and difference of gender. The aim behind Carhullan is not just survival: it is to remove all male influence ... Rich and exhilarating as it is disturbing.

    Tom Gatti, The Times

  • A superb novel from the author of The Electric Michelangelo. This is a hugely compelling novel of a nightmarish but conceivable future, brilliantly written.

    Ruth Atkins, Bookseller's Choice, The Bookseller

Sarah Hall

Books

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About

Sarah Hall is one of the UK’s most talented authors. Twice nominated for Man-Booker Prize, the first and only writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice, she has written 10 highly acclaimed novels and short story collections.

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