Sarah Hall & Jáchym Topol

Sarah Hall is our guest on the occasion of the publication of her new novel, How to Paint a Dead Man. In her characteristically beautiful prose, she explores the relationship between art and death. We are taken back to the early 1960s, to an old and famous Italian painter and a blind girl living in the same village. Then, thirty years later, to a middle-aged landscape painter. His daughter is organizing an exhibition in London while simultaneously mourning the death of her twin brother and risking the loss of herself in a dark world of erotic excess.

“This extraordinarily sensual novel is a rarity: an intelligently written page-turner that you also want to savour slowly in order to fully appreciate Hall’s richly sensuous style.” – Sunday Telegraph

How to Paint a Dead Man is Hall’s fourth novel. She has already received awards including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her debut Haweswater and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for The Electric Michelangelo.

Jáchym Topol wrote his debut novel Sestra about the Velvet Revolution. In doing so, he remained faithful to his family’s political and literary tradition: his grandfather was a writer, and his father, Josef Topol, was a poet, playwright, and friend of Václav Havel, and therefore long a dissident himself. With Sestra, Topol emerged in 1994 at the forefront of Czech literature. He is now regarded as one of Europe’s greatest contemporary authors.

His new novel, The Devil's Workshop, is set in Theresienstadt, a town full of underground tunnels, catacombs, barracks, and hidden places, where the concentration camp of the same name was located during the World War II. Now the town has fallen into decay. The novel’s narrator, who was born and raised there, becomes involved in attempts to save the town from collapse through the commercial exploitation of wartime memory. The course of events raises a sinister question: could what happened then happen to us again?

“Topol writes sincerely and passionately, and I love that.” – Cees Nooteboom

“The best book of 2006.” – Margot Dijkgraaf, NRC Handelsblad (about Gargling with Tar)