Whenever I’ve read Sarah Hall’s work previously (see my posts on The Carhullan Army and ‘Butcher’s Perfume‘), I have always been struck by her use of landscape and strong sense of place. I see those qualities again in ‘The Reservation’, which is one of those extracts in the Granta anthology that really makes me feel excited about reading the full novel.

Hall’s protagonist is Rachel, who returns to Cumbria for the first time in six years, having been working on a reservation in Idaho. She is here for a new commission from a wealthy entrepreneur, but also to see her dying mother. There are suggestions of an interesting contrast to be explored between the different spaces of the Reservation and the entrepreneur’s estate; and the implication that the hospice where Rachel’s mother lives is a kind of reservation itself. I am suitably intrigued about Hall’s novel-to-come.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.