How to Paint a Dead Man

How to Paint a Dead Man
By Sarah Hall
Faber £7.99, 289 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

Sarah Hall’s beautiful and visually engaging novel succeeds in bringing together a quartet of stories from different eras and places.

A photographer in present-day London, Susie battles depression following the death of her twin brother, and embarks on an affair with the owner of the gallery where she works.

Trapped after falling into a Cumbrian gorge, Susie’s landscape painter father, Peter, recalls his time at art college and his rise to fame.

Then there is an old Italian artist to whom Peter once wrote. In the early 1960s, he reviews his life (including a skirmish with fascism) while painting a final still-life.

Finally, a blind girl who is terrorised by her mother’s Catholic superstitions, tends the Italian artist’s grave.

Hall cleverly jostles story and period to frame the nodes that connect these lives across 50 years. Subtle details illuminate individual fates. But the whole, like an abstract painting, remains tantalisingly opaque.