'Salute the liars – they can make the real world disappear and a fresh world take its place...' Set in a coastal Stone Age village at the advent of bronze, Jim Crace's second novel, published for the first time in Penguin paperback, is marked by astonishing poetic resonance and daring imagination...
Craft and good writing make this book a hit with many readers. Innovative form and thinking prose set the right words in the right places. The story brings readers an introspective reflection upon death, seen through the lens of a married couple whom it overtakes.The form of the story weaves alon...
My copy of Continent contains the following inscription:For Simon,Christmas 1986All the best for the New Year & any new continents you may take on-There's a signature below it, but it's incomprehensible. The copy in question is a hardback published by William Heinemann in London in 1986, apparent...
Now this is how you write a gripping book.Quarantine is what you might call a novel of ideas. It seeks to give an account of Jesus' forty-day sojourn in the desert and to explain how Christianity (or, if you will, the cult of Christ) came into being. While it's not overly blasphemous, it does pre...
I thought Jim Crace's Being Dead was a phenomenally weird read read, chock o' block with passages of eerie beauty and shivery meditations on mortality. I don't think I "liked it" per se, but I could not get it out of my head. I had never read anything quite like it at the time, and still haven't....
English author, Jim Crace, winner of last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction with Being Dead, brings another novel of a most unique variety. The Devil’s Larder is a collection of sixty-four very short stories, all with one thing in common – food.Here Crace has really stretched...
Have you ever heard of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest? He was an English novelist who was immensely popular during the Victorian period, but is now best remembered for his dramatic, florid language. He coined the famous opening line "It was a dark and stormy night"in h...
And after all the quashing there remains a taleGENESIS may not live up to Jim Crace's monumental peak of writing he reached with BEING DEAD, but I think it deserves much more examination than those who dismiss it as a work of Ego onanism. The very nature of the story of an Actor who struts the st...
QUILL’S GOOD COMPANY this afternoon and cannot help but dream about the sort of life I might spend with him should I escape the fleecy prospects of our fields by leaving here in his employ. At least, that is my maturing scheme. I could be gone within the week, if he takes to me and if my current ...
Shared Beds FOR THAT ONE HOUR between Walter Howells’s ‘You’re not much use to me’ and the arrival of the sailors from the Belle, Aymer viewed his task in Wherrytown with less timidity. The obligations of Duty and Conscience were unchanged, of course. He could not take pleasure in the lecture-wit...
She has a daughter now. They talk. They meet. They do their best. Life’s not perfect, but it’s better than it was. She and Nadia stay in touch once in a while—a birthday card, a text, a scrap of news. Lucy and Swallow exchanged an e-mail each and meant to meet in town when they had the time, but ...
She lived a little way from town – ten minutes on the bus, a forty-minute walk. She did not count herself so poor or so energetic that she need queue at market stalls and then transport her purchases by bag and bus. Within a hundred metres of her home there was a delicatessen with a fresh-product...
So now it is Mouetta’s turn. Whispering and smudging his ear with her lipstick, her breath a little sour from the garlic in her lunch, she confirms her first, his sixth, pregnancy. His sixth at least. She’s “passed the urine test,” she says—an unintended play on words which she acknowledges in th...