It's taut and intense, reflective and passionate, this is a book about connection and transformation.

I often feel the same when I read other bloggers’ reviews…’hmm, maybe not for me personally, but definitely something I would recommend to others’. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. The Carhullan Army (2007), won the 2007 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction.Hall's virus is much deadlier than anything we have seen from Covid so far, but she does envisage a future in which it has been conquered.

And Burntcoat will be transformed too, into a new and feverish world, a place in which Edith comes to an understanding of how we survive the impossible – and what is left after we have.Hall has written an emotionally-charged novel that is tribute, extended nightmare, love story and - somehow - manages to claw back some kind of human dignity and strength in the face of the inevitability of death. I have appreciated other recent novels that serve to record some of the specific details of the living-through-a-pandemic experience, but Burntcoat is the first I’ve read that puts that experience through the crucible of artistic sensibility and turns the details into art. When I entered Teshima, a domed installation Shun had insisted I visit, I understood some form of perfection had been achieved. These are all relevant, significant questions but perhaps too complex, too ambitious for a novel of this size and nature to properly address.

There are vivid descriptions of hot summer days, and water is a recurring theme; the river, water for washing, for drinking, sustaining. It is narrated by 59-year old Edith Harkness, a survivor, who surveys the life-changing pandemic with the benefit of intervening time. We meet her at the opening of the novel, putting the finishing touches on a commission meant to mark the victims of the pandemic, which prompts her recollections of that painful event.It seems particularly appropriate that Halit is a Muslim immigrant from Turkey [by way of his family’s expulsion from Bulgaria], and as he is isolated from his family back home, his relationship with the white Englishwoman prods at the cultural differences between them while underscoring their meaninglessness. I knew going into the book that it was inspired by COVID and written during lockdown, but I hadn’t reckoned with the emotional and mental response I would have: it turns out that (and I didn’t know this about myself) I was not really ready to cope with books about pandemics that paint such a bleak prognosis (the virus in this book has a twist in its tale that took me to a dark place). My reading experience with Burntcoat was a little like dining at a Michelin star restaurant when I would have been fine just swinging by a drive-thru.