The Carhullan Army

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The story is a found text, the confessional narrative of a woman who has escaped a town in Cumbria for a Women's collective based at Carhullan, a hill farm up in the fells by the Lake District. She retains her poetic exactness, though: rock showing through the grassland is "the bones of an older district, stripped by the wind". The south-west barn range is built against the end of the north-west range, and its farmyard elevation is partially open fronted; further to the left there is an inserted chamfered, stone-mullioned ground floor window, a single ventilation slit, and a pitching door.

Sister undergoes a complete sort of physical and psychological stripping-down, yet comes to view Carhullan as near perfection because it ran "a high level of courtesy and enlightenment, a society that celebrated female strength and tolerance". To say that her arrival doesn’t go entirely as expected is putting it mildly, but after a shaky start she settles in and knuckles down, forming friendships and adapting to a hard pastoral lifestyle that, despite its difficulties, is nonetheless more fulfilling than the life she left behind in the way that self-sufficiency often is. There was a fresh red field on the other side and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of war that history had never let us gather. I’ve often wondered how much that matters – Sarah Hall is a name I could read a dozen times and skip over, whereas something like Kurt Vonnegut sticks in my head instantly!

Her first two novels, Haweswater and The Electric Michelangelo (shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize in 2004), were both set in the early 20th century in her native Cumbria. A beautiful Cumbrian farmhouse that enjoys a spectacular location, high up on Bampton Common among the Lake Districts eastern fells and close to Ullswater and Haweswater. The stone-slabbed cross passage has a six-panel door and architrave, with an upright handle with back plate, that opens into a large room. It’s a novel that provoked a wide range of responses, and it’s worth going and reading some of the reviews that Niall Harrison lists here, as well as Nick Hubble’s excellent piece from Vector 258.

There is an open-plan living room with a kitchen, dining area and sitting area with a woodburning stove, a utility and an additional sitting room with a woodburning stove. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. Set in a Manchester run by extreme right-wing Neo Conservatives, this novel looks at the possibilities of illegal youth detention and human rights. In addition, guests can give separate ‘subscores’ in crucial areas, such as location, cleanliness, staff, comfort, facilities, value for money and free Wi-Fi. Sykes Cottages – “Lovely very cosy, comfy cottage set in beautiful surroundings, could not have asked for more.Should I be celebrating the fact that whatever happens to us on the outside, we can always choose our womanhood the inside? The first third of the book deals with the narrator's Day One of her Year Zero when she makes the journey to Carhullen and the reception that she receives there. This is flanked to the left by a pair of ground and first floor ventilation slits, and to the right by a first-floor ventilation slit, and an inserted two-light, chamfered stone mullioned window below. The narrator sees herself in the mirror towards the close of the book - and she no longer recognises herself, her nature has been nurtured through tough mothering into something foreign to her, she has become her own anima. Life after “the collapse” is hemmed in by restrictions and regulations, with curfew at home and conflict abroad.

Like her first novel, Haweswater (2002), The Carhullan Army is set in Cumbria, and Hall's sharp and vivid evocation of landscape ("The light was fading fast, and the rust-coloured bracken in the banks looked like a tide of scrap metal") has the value of rooting her dark fantasy in a recognisable rural world .I don’t know when this accent on beautiful passages and philosophical monologues went up and the focus on the plot went down.

com is a distributor (without any obligation to verify) and not a publisher of these comments and responses. Ultimately, the Carhullan women are definitely, vitally, female, but what makes them strong is their willpower, and their story is both full-blooded, compelling and real.

Presented as transcripts of a female prisoner’s statement recovered from a Lancaster jail, disaster looms over the novel from the start.