How we come in, and how we go out, sex and death: these are the governing drives, our two greatest themes.
In this provocative and haunting collection of short stories, acclaimed writers probe the nature of, and connection between two of the most powerful, exhilarating and terrifying forces that define and shape the human experience: sex and death.
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.
Peter Hobbs is the author of two novels, The Short Day Dying and In The Orchard, The Swallows, as well as a collection of short stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train. His work has won a Betty Trask Award, and been shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the John Lewellyn Rhys Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a writer-in-residence for the schools literacy charity, First Story.