Interview: Writer Sarah Hall's novels paint communities teeming with life and teetering near death

Sarah Hall was born in 1974 and brought up in Cumbria, just a few miles from the valley of Mardale, which was flooded in the 1930s in the creation of the Haweswater Reservoir. She both studied and taught the M.Litt. in Creative Writing at St Andrew's University, and began writing poetry seriously at the age of 20. Now predominantly a fiction writer, her first novel, Haweswater (2002) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her second, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. She has lived in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, North Carolina and London, but now lives with her partner, the poet Jacob Polley, in the Lake District, where her latest novel, the dystopian The Carhullan Army, is set.

In the winter of 2005, living alone in Carlisle, Sarah Hall came home to find that her house was flooded. "It seemed impossible," she remembers. "It was so quick. I hadn't got any of my stuff out. When the water went down I managed to get in to the house at about 11 o'clock at night, and there was river mud all up the walls. The flood water had torn up the floor and it was awful. It's sewage and... it's horrible. It was heartbreaking."

It seems entirely appropriate to be meeting her now in a deluge, in the middle of the wettest summer on record. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a writer who grew up in the Lake District, her books are saturated with water: the soft rain and the flooded valley of Haweswater; the gentle pull of the sea in The Electric Michelangelo. Her latest, The Carhullan Army (Faber, £14.99), is set in a dystopian near-future in which the waters have risen and the power failed. Anyone reading it this summer will find it frighteningly prophetic.

Hall's output is hard to categorise – though many have tried. "My American publisher thinks it's hysterical," she laughs. "She's compiling a list of all the writers I've been compared to, and it's ridiculous: Joyce on one end and Hardy on the other. I don't have a tag, and women writers often need a tag." They will struggle with this book. You could say it contains elements of The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, Lord of the Flies... But it is entirely of the moment.

The novel's introduction announces that it is the "statement of a female prisoner detained under Section 4 (b) of the Insurgency Prevention (Unrestricted Powers) Act". Its narrator, "Sister", has fled the city, with its compulsory sterilisation of women and the Orwellian rule of The Authority, to head for the hills, a ramshackle farmhouse and its agrarian army of tooled-up women. If the introduction makes it sound like a satire on current government policy, it is not far wrong: this is a political book. But it is also part-thriller, part-science fiction, and a love story, of sorts.

The book is something of a departure from Hall's previous writing. It is the first to be written in the first person, which was difficult, even unsettling. It is pacier and more full of action than her other novels. When The Electric Michelangelo was shortlisted for the Booker in 2004, her prose was praised as "sensuous, poetic", "muscular, glinting", "Lawrentian" and "torrential" (those watery metaphors again). For much of the novel, not a great deal really happens. Dialogue is sparse and dry, but the novel is dripping with description. Falling in love, for instance, is "the diaphanous flutter of Fate's lungs, the sluicing of its digestive system, its marrowy brewing of new blood". By contrast, when Sister develops feelings of tenderness they are intrinsically linked in her mind with the idea of holding a gun to her lover's head.

Hall admits that this book is very different from her previous two. "I think the first books are quite ... I hate to say poetic, but they have a language quality to them." The Carhullan Army is deliberately different. "It is quite a short, quite a dramatic novel. It feels more of an urgent book. I did find myself editing back the language a lot." She is pleased with the end result, she says, "although it is kind of freakish. I don't know whether to love it or to stick it in a sack and drown it."

She started writing it when she was living in the States, where she saw their blinkered way of looking at energy reserves, and despaired. As ever, her acknowledgements make for fun reading. There are no Coney Island tattoo artists, as in The Electric Michelangelo, or dam engineers, as in Haweswater. In this case, she expresses gratitude for advice about weather systems and military techniques. "I'd been reading up about the futurology of oil," she says. "I'm a real geek."

It seems that Hall has researched this future corner of England as thoroughly as she did Depression-era Coney Island and 1930s Haweswater. Her descriptions of how weather systems have changed and energy sources failed are discomfitingly real. But the real story is about what drives the women on the farm, their relationships, and their relative willingness to fight the system. It was liberating, she says, to write outside the confines of historical accuracy, and where her imagination leads is chilling. A rural girl, and multiply tattooed to boot, she was never squeamish about the extremes of human horribleness. But this novel is interested in exploring exactly how far, physically and mentally, women are prepared to go. At one point, Jackie Nixon, the charismatic, brutal, damaged leader of the women, demands of Sister: "How bad does a situation have to be before a woman will strike out, not in defence, but because something is worth fighting for?" Hall has certainly written women who are fighters before, but this is a question that she increasingly ponders.

"There is an idea of us, as women, being innately pacifist and kind of reactionary," she says. "I'm interested in the idea that women are as aggressive as men but, over centuries, we have been taught not to be. We are – and I think it's increasingly apparent that's the case." Does she describe herself as a feminist? "Yes," she says, at once. But then she adds: "But people think you're rabid. Either that or they talk about a post-feminist society, which is complete arse. If anything, things are rolling back."

What does link this novel with those that went before is undoubtedly the author's mastery of landscape, and the characters who are rooted in it. "I spent so much time outdoors when I was younger – hours and hours, whatever the weather. I was so conscious of this landscape that we were in all the time. I suppose, inevitably, it's going to find its way into the writing. But also, whatever I'm writing and wherever it's set, I feel like I've got to locate it. It's not a paying of respects, exactly. But I still can't imagine a vacuum of place."

She cites Thomas Hardy, to whom she has been compared: "It's about who belongs in the landscape and who is in conflict and how that might play out." Also like Hardy, she lovingly describes fragile, often rural societies on the edge of death. Or murder, in the case of the "drowned village" of Mardale, which was flooded to create the Haweswater dam. In times of drought its ruined buildings appear, ghostly, above the surface. The village of Mardale, and the character of Janet – a sort of feisty, northern Maggie Tulliver – seem so perfectly novelistic that it is hard to believe the subject matter is recent history.

"I was brought up four miles away from Mardale, so it was one of those things that was too close – it didn't seem like a story," she says. "And then one day I thought, 'This is actually something colossal that happened locally. Local people don't really talk about stuff like that; people were upset when I wrote it. They thought it was something terrible that had never really been expressed. I was very, very nervous. More nervous about how people in the village would react than about any reviews."

What she did write was a loving, sad portrayal of a world that no longer exists, a world literally flooded by big industry – you could say, a world whose loss is leading directly, inexorably to the dystopian vision of The Carhullan Army. Having grown up in a farming community, Hall sees it disappearing before her eyes. "We've centralised milk!" she says, aghast, adding that her junior school recently closed after 400 years. Second-homers are changing the demographic of the valley. There just aren't the children any more.

When she is not writing novels, Hall says, she sometimes finds it hard to switch off. She still "scribbles", but has abandoned the idea of writing poetry professionally. "The more I find out about the poetry industry in this country, the less likely I am to broach it. Poetry reviewers seem to loathe poetry. It's such a shame."

Instead, she makes intricate sculptures, Victorian shadow boxes, with things she finds. Some are of the seaside, with shells and photos of rough-skinned fish gutters. But the first was from her own backyard.

"If you go to Haweswater and down to the water's edge, you can find bits of crockery and glass left over from the 1920s. I found a piece of glass that had 'ark' written on it, and I thought, 'Flooded valley; ark; that's really nice.'" And so she constructs perfect miniatures of place and time, paying her respects to the character of a landscape and the people who live in it. Which doesn't seem that much removed from her writing, at all.