Reading Well: Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall

Daughters of the North (2007, originally published as The Carhullan Army) by Sarah Hall sits in the very thin area of overlap between literary and post-apocalyptic fiction. As such, it is a significantly higher level of craft than most of the latter category, and that certainly softens my opinion of it: there is an elegance to her writing that moves Daughters of the North well beyond “compelling page-turner.”

Hall is a writer to watch, and a write-up of her longer (and, at least from a writing perspective, “more serious”) novel, The Electric Michelangelo, should appear at some point. But I read this first.

I love her writing, which is complex, evocative, and emotionally direct, here telling an explicitly feminist story set in a Britain ravaged by war and environmental disaster. The protagonist finds her way to a camp populated by an exclusively female, armed resistance, and the book follows her struggles to survive alongside, integrate with, and ultimately take up arms alongside them.

While the ending is a bit slapdash, it’s an enjoyable read, and the setting is realized magnificently. Indeed, that is what first drew me to Hall’s writing: her ability to capture a certain geography, the bramble and gorse land that sits between England and Scotland, is quite special.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

There are writers who seem to share a surreal bond with a specific sense of place, and Hall is one: she feels utterly confident and utterly at home writing about that specific geography, filling the hills and valleys with emotional content as well as evocative description.