Walking ahead of him on the heath, his wife turns to look at him over her shoulder, 'Topaz eyes glinting. Scorched face. Vixen.'

In language harvested from nature, Sarah Hall tells a story of metamorphosis, of wildness and fecundity, and of a man reaching for reason, who cannot let go of the creature he loves.

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the prize-winning author of five novels - Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border - as well as The Beautiful Indifference, a collection of short stories, which won the Portico Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. The first story in the collection, 'Butchers Perfume', was also shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award - a prize Hall won in 2013 with 'Mrs Fox', which was included in her 2017 collection, Madame Zero.