How to Paint a Dead Man

How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.

In 1960s Italy, a dying artist - a recluse, and an enigma to strangers and loved ones alike - begins his last painting. In Cumbria thirty years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian painter - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator struggling with sudden grief while planning an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon.

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 - as well as The Beautiful Indifference, a collection of short stories. The first story in the collection, 'Butchers Perfume', was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, a prize she won in 2013 with 'Mrs Fox'.

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• Allen & Unwin How to Paint a Dead Man book Fiction English Paperback 304 pages