"Hall's writing manages to combine acute sensitivity and daring. ... Visceral and engaging. ... The emotional lives of her characters are skillfully realized in this bright weave of disparate voices-for whom art is at once a way of seeing and a way of life." -The Times (London)

The lives of four individuals-a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator-intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power. With How to Paint a Dead Man, , Sarah Hall, "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain's young novelists" ( The Guardian), delivers "a maddeningly enticing read...an amazing feat of literary engineering" ( The Independent on Sunday).

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. She is the prizewinning author of six novels and three short story collections. She is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, Edge Hill Short Story Prize, among others, and the only person ever to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice.

From Sarah Hall, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Daughters of the North and The Electric Michelangelo comes the Harper Perennial paperback original novel How to Paint a Dead Man, a daringly imaginative tale in which multiple lives are woven together through the prism of a still life painting. Moving from Italy to England, spanning nearly half a century, and bringing together the lives of four disparate characters, How to Paint a Dead Man is Hall's fierce and brilliant study of art and its place in our lives.