Anticipating her imminent transformation into a vixen, Sophia – the subject of ‘Mrs Fox’, the unsettling, erotically charged short story that opened Sarah Hall’s previous collection, Madame Zero – ‘dreams subterranean dreams, of forests, dark corridors and burrows, roots and earth’. Two years later, Hall has produced a new set of ‘subterranean dreams’. Sudden Traveller returns to the burrow of primal preoccupations from which much of her previous short-story work emerged – in 2016, as if formalising these themes, she even edited a collection called Sex and Death – but this time her writing is even tighter, angrier and more sublime.

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