Sarah Hall's prize-winning fiction is unusual for the wide-ranging nature of its concerns. These include region and ecology, aesthetics and gender, as well as such topics as the flooding of a Lakeland valley to build a reservoir, the artistry of tattooing, a futuristic vision of a British dictatorship, and the planned reintroduction of wolves into Cumbria. Yet although critics praise Hall's fiction for its distinctive imagery and style, several have noted in it an absence of the tension, suspense and jeopardy of conventional narrative. An exploration of her novels shows that, in place of these plot-related elements, a new kind of fiction is evident, drawing on poetic and imagistic features in place of either a postmodern self-consciousness or the overt politics of realism in order to tell a story.

Hall's first novel, Haweswater (2002), was inspired by the real-life flooding of the Cumbrian Mardale Valley in 1935 to create a reservoir designed to serve the population of Manchester. This entailed the destruction of the valley's farms and villages, though we find in the acknowledgements, as a means of emphasising its imagined form, that the story the novel tells ‘is fictional and is not intended to depict actual individuals, companies or situations, nor are the dates historically accurate’. Haweswater focuses on the love affair between two fictional characters, Janet Lightburn, the daughter of a Mardale farmer, and Jack Liggett, the emissary of Manchester Waterworks. As their shared initials suggest, the lovers are drawn together precisely because of the ‘electric energy’ (H, 114) of their intensely opposed perspectives: Janet takes legal advice against the construction of the dam, but for Jack the flooding of the valley paradoxically honours a childhood spent visiting the Lakelands. The positional antipathy between the two is acted out in the detail of their relationship: we learn that Janet ‘still needed to attack [Jack] before she could love’ (H, 120), and that after his public declaration of their bond ‘her anger converts itself’ into passion (H, 180). In anticipation of The Wolf Border (2015), where we learn that the wolves’ only predator, the golden eagle, is ‘long gone from the county’, it is Jack's re-engagement with the landscape and its wildlife that causes his death.