Synopses & Reviews
Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him.
Review
"Hall's intelligence and ambition are thrilling to behold...she manages to combine the plummy sensuality of Marguerite Duras with the silken abstractions of Michael Ondaatje." BookForum
Review
"A Man Booker finalist, Hall's sweeping novel explores timeless themes of loss and redemption with an ageless wisdom and grace." Booklist
Review
"Sarah Hall..steps right out on that dazzling wire....It's amazing work." Carolyn See, The Washington Post
Review
"The best moments are like this glimpse of the aurora borealis over Morecambe Bay....Like that mysterious light, Hall's novel is to be admired for its own slow grace." Susann Cokal, The New York Times
Review
"The characters are flat, the story travels far without ever really going anywhere and the occasional attempts to philosophize about tattoos are generally fatuous. A lot of flash, and not much more." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
"Wickedly imagined and richly written. . . . Prose as highly colored as Hall's has to to be savored."--The Independent
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy -- a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort -- Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him.
About the Author
Sarah Hall was born in 1974 in Cumbria, England. She received a master of letters in creative writing from Scotland's St. Andrews University and has published four novels. Haweswater won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (overall winner, Best First Novel) and a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award. The Electric Michelangelo was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Eurasia Region), and the Prix Femina Étranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Daughters of the North won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. How to Paint a Dead Man was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction. In 2013 Hall was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, a prize awarded every ten years, and she won the BBC National Short Story Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.