Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize "Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in."--Colum McCann "Baume leaves nothing unturned in this dark and sometimes funny excavation of the human heart." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Fascinating, because of the cumulative power of the precise, pleasingly rhythmic sentences, and the unpredictable intelligence of the narrator's mind." --Guardian Struggling to cope with urban life--and life in general--Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to her family's rural house on "turbine hill," vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, that she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here--her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school--and maybe, just maybe, regain her footing in art and life. As Frankie picks up photography once more, closely examining the natural world around her, she reconsiders seminal works of art and their relevance. With "prose that makes sure we look and listen,"* Sara Baume has written an elegant novel that is as much an exploration of wildness, the art world, mental illness, and community as it is a profoundly beautiful and powerful meditation on life. *Atlantic "Baume's writing is near-faultless." --Financial Times "A novel of uniqueness, wonder, recognition, poignancy, truth-speaking, quiet power, strange beauty, and luminous bedazzlement." -- Joseph O'Connor

The mountain remained, unclimbed, for the first year that they lived there. Bell and Sigh, a couple in the infancy of their relationship, cut themselves off from friends and family. They turn their backs on a city divided by scores of streets and hundreds of sterile cherry trees, by a foul river and a declining population of house sparrows. Them in and the world out. From the top of the nearby mountain, they are told, you can see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples. All you have to do is climb. Taking place in a remote house in the south-west of Ireland, this rich and vivid novel spans seven years and speaks to the times we live in, asking how we may withdraw, how better to live in the natural world, and how the choices made or avoided lead us home.

'Every devotee of literature and art should read this rare, bright-lit, hard-won book, and every student of life - that is to say, everyone.' - Sebastian Barry In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to try to live as an artist. Elegantly encompassing images from a work-in-progress, handiwork offers observations that are at once gentle and devastating on grief, renewal, and the migration of birds. handiwork is Baume's non-fiction debut, written with the keen eye for nature and beauty as well as the extraordinary versatility Sara Baume's fans have come to expect.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2017 'When I finished Sara Baume's new novel I immediately felt sad that I could not send it in the post to the late John Berger. He, too, would have loved it and found great joy in its honesty, its agility, its beauty, its invention. Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in.' Colum McCann Struggling to cope with urban life - and with life in general - Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to the rural bungalow on 'turbine hill' that has been vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by nature, that she hopes to regain her footing in art and life. She spends her days pretending to read, half-listening to the radio, failing to muster the energy needed to leave the safety of her haven. Her family come and go, until they don't and she is left alone to contemplate the path that led her here, and the smell of the carpet that started it all. Finding little comfort in human interaction, Frankie turns her camera lens on the natural world and its reassuring cycle of life and death. What emerges is a profound meditation on the interconnectedness of wilderness, art and individual experience, and a powerful exploration of human frailty.