Rothko’s Red

Synopsis

Rothko’s Red is a collection of ten stories, subtly linked by painting and art, about the lives of women: their hopes, fears, failures and challenges. They reveal the choices and destinies of characters from various backgrounds, embracing the harsh realities of desire, loss and ageing. Powerful, yet tender, psychologically intricate and emotionally perceptive, these stories examine the complex lives of modern women. Substantial, moving and beautifully written they call upon Sue Hubbard’s wide ranging knowledge of and feel for art.

Praise for this Book

‘A dazzling collection.’ —Ruth Fainlight

Reviews of this Book

‘Sue Hubbard achieves the impossible for a woman writer – she manages to be feminine, with balls. Her stories are perceptive, sensitive, funny, sad and gutsy, and reach parts most women's writing doesn't, for me anyway. I've never read anything that so honestly documents the way women – especially older women – think and feel, and the difficulties men have with that, without apportioning blame. Rothko's Red deserves to be widely read.’ —Laura Gascoigne, Amazon.co.uk

‘Evidence of the poet’s gift for imagery – “the wind snaps at the washing, filling out the drying shirts like the bloated bodies of the drowned” – is in plentiful supply.’

Praise for Previous Work

‘on Depth of Field: Highly evocative ... the rare quality, not of a text, but of a place. It surrounds its readers and waits until they see in the dark to make their own discoveries.’ —John Berger

‘Depth of Field is a poet's novel in the best sense of the word; lyrical, highly visual and beautifully observed. At its heart is a profound and moving study of one woman's struggle for self-determination.’ —John Burnside

‘on Depth of Field: This is a first novel by a writer of genuine talent. Sue Hubbard's originality lies in the gritty detail of the imaged past she pursues among the realities of a contemporary East End. This gives a remarkable freshness to her theme of a lost Jewish identity underlying Hannah's moving story.’ —Elaine Feinstein

‘This is remarkable writing, born of a long and painful negotiation both with personal experience and the art of poetry.’ —Martyn Crucefix, Magma

‘Sue Hubbard's poems are haunting, sensuous and at times disturbingly sharp in their revealed intimacies; her eye – and her touch – are vividly alive to pleasures of surface, as well as to dark depths of anger and melancholy.

’ —Marina Warner

‘She reminds me of Gwen John in her stillness and love of the ‘actually loved and known’ ... giving generously of life and warmth and technical mastery.’ —Sebastian Barker