Best Selling Books by Jim Crace

A National Book Critics Circle Award–winning novel and "a narrative of dazzling virtuosity" about love, death and the afterlife ( Publishers Weekly). Baritone Bay, mid-afternoon. A couple, naked, married almost thirty years, are lying murdered in the dunes. "Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell—just look at them—that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet." "A tour de force." — Library Journal "A work of near-genius . . . [by] one of the most distinctive and talented writers of our time." — Literary Review "Magnificent." — The Sunday Telegraph "A brilliant, astonishing novel." — The Times (London)

SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year On the morning after harvest, the inhabitants of a remote English village awaken looking forward to a hard-earned day of rest and feasting at their landowner''s table. But the sky is marred by two conspicuous columns of smoke, replacing pleasurable anticipation with alarm and suspicion. One smoke column is the result of an overnight fire that has damaged the master''s outbuildings. The second column rises from the wooded edge of the village, sent up by newcomers to announce their presence. In the minds of the wary villagers a mere coincidence of events appears to be unlikely, with violent confrontation looming as the unavoidable outcome. Meanwhile, another newcomer has recently been spotted taking careful notes and making drawings of the land. It is his presence more than any other that will threaten the village''s entire way of life. In effortless and tender prose, Jim Crace details the unraveling of a pastoral idyll in the wake of economic progress. His tale is timeless and unsettling, framed by a beautifully evoked world that will linger in your memory long after you finish reading.

Jim Crace''s novel is the brilliantly imagined story of Christ''s forty days in the wilderness, a tale of three men, two women, and a curious wanderer whose peculiar fate is transformed into legend. Dazzling, gritty, and utterly compelling, Quarantine is a work at once timeless and timely - a parable for the ages.

Victor, an eighty-year-old multimillionaire, surveys his empire from the remoteness of his cloud-capped penthouse. Expensively insulated from the outside world, he nonetheless finds that memories of his impoverished childhood will not be kept so easily at bay. Focusing on the one area of vitality and chaos that remains in the streets below him, he formulates a plan to leave a mark on the city – one as indelible and disruptive as the mark the city left on him.

Crace’s second novel confirmed his status as a writer of great imagination and skill. Set at the twilight of the Stone Age, a young man elects himself the village storyteller, and hunts restlessly, far and wide, for inspiration. But the information he finds and the people he meets warn of the advent of a new age and the coming of a metal that will change their community’s life irrevocably.

Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States has become sparsely populated and chaotically unstable. Across the country, families have traveled toward the one hope left: passage on a ship to Europe. As Franklin Lopez makes his way towards the ocean, he finds Margaret, a sick woman shunned to die in isolation. Tentatively, the two join forces, heading towards their future. With striking prose and a deep understanding of the American ethos, Jim Crace, one of our most consistently ambitious writers, creates in The Pesthouse a masterful tale of the human drive to endure.

Alfred Busi lives alone in his villa overlooking the waves. Famed in his tiny Mediterranean town for his music, he is mourning the recent death of his wife and quietly living out his days. Then one night, Busi is viciously attacked by an intruder in his own courtyard—bitten and scratched. He insists his assailant was neither man nor animal. Soon, Busi’s account of what happened is being embellished to fan the flames of old rumor—of an ancient race of people living in the surrounding forest. It is also used to spark new controversy, inspiring claims that something must finally be done about the town’s poor, whose numbers have been growing. In trademark crystalline prose, Jim Crace portrays a man taking stock of his life and looking into an uncertain future, while bearing witness to a community in the throes of great change.

Set in Texas and the suburbs of England, All That Follows is a novel in which tender, unheroic moments triumph over the more strident and aggressive facets of our age. British jazzman Leonard Lessing spent a memorable yet unsuccessful few days in Austin, Texas, trying to seduce a woman he fancied. During his stay, he became caught up in her messy life, which included a new lover, a charismatic but carelessly violent man named Maxie. Eighteen years later, Maxie enters Leonard''s life again, but this time in England, where he is armed and holding hostages. Leonard must decide whether to sit silently by as the standoff unfolds or find the courage to go to the crime scene where he could potentially save lives, as only someone who knows Maxie can. The lives of two mothers and two daughters - all strikingly independent and spirited - hang in the balance. All That Follows provides moving and surprising insights into the conflict between our private and public lives and redefines heroism in this new century. It is a masterful work one of England''s brightest literary lights.

On its first publication over twenty years ago, this captivating novel marked the arrival of one of the most imaginative minds at work: a writer capable of transporting his readers to a strange and wonderful landscape while revealing the humanity within the mirage.

November, 1836. A fierce gale beaches an American steamer off the English coast, injuring an African slave below decks and eventually disgorging 300 head of cattle and an inn-ful of rowdy American sailors into a hardscrabble fishing village. The same storm drives into port a ship from London, bearing one Aymer Smith, the foolish well-intentioned prig who will deprive the town of its livelihood, free the American slave, and set into motion a whole series of unforeseeable, tragicomic events. Chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 1995, Signals of Distress, Jim Crace''s fourth novel, once again displays the author''s gift for inventing richly strange and believable worlds that uncannily foretell our own.

Winner of the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for "Being Dead, " Crace is known for his finely honed style. Here he gets to work really close to the bone, producing 60 brief flights of fantasy on appetite, food and objects of desire.

In the theatres and the restaurants of the celebrated City of Kisses, timid actor Felix Dern is famous and admired... for his looks... for his voice... and for his unblemished private life. But ''Lix'' feels besieged. His perfect life has been blighted since his teens... for every woman that he sleeps with bears his child. So, now it is Mouetta''s turn. Their baby''s due in May. Another child? To be so fertile is a curse... Raunchy, revelatory and beautifully refined, Six charts the sexual history of a loving, baffled man, the sexual emancipation of a city, and the sexual ambiguities of humankind.

From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Harvest and Quarantine, a gorgeous, unforgettable retelling of the myth of Eden. The inhabitants of Eden are untouched by death. In the garden they care for their orchards and the land, and give thanks for their good fortune, because they know that beyond the garden walls is a world where disease and hunger rampage. Eden is overseen by angels—their bodies covered in blue iridescent feathers, their beaks sharp and curved. It is a pleasant place where no one wants for a thing. But, as this story begins, something is wrong in Eden. Because years after Adam and Eve left the garden, another inhabitant has escaped… Weaving together elements of the dystopian, but never letting go of the sense of the sacred that saturates western myths of a perfect world before the fall, Eden manages to be both a critique of those stories and a sad reprise of their now-lost themes. In Crace’s wry, tender recreation, though, love does not bring the world crashing down. It is love that redeems it.

The winner of the National Book Critics'' Circle Award and the Whitbread Novel of the Year charts the sexual history of a loving, baffled man, the sexual emancipation of a city, and the sexual ambiguities of humankind.

Alfred Busi, dit Mr Al, est attaqué chez lui par une créature étrange. Les médias crient à l’invasion de bêtes féroces pendant qu’Alfred affirme que son assaillant est un enfant rendu fou par la faim. Alfred, chanteur reconnu qui vient de perdre son épouse, devient alors malgré lui la seule voix dissonante dans la petite ville d’Angleterre frappée depuis quelques temps par de mystérieuses agressions. Lui appelle à la compassion et à l’action collective, alors que les habitants du coin se calfeutrent et développent un discours réactionnaire de plus en plus haineux. D’un sujet de société – la pauvreté, le sort des migrants – Jim Crace a fait un roman-fable mélancolique qui est aussi une réflexion sur la place de l’artiste dans le monde.

De oude chansonnier Alfred Busi slijt zijn dagen in de prachtige vervallen villa aan de kust waar hij is opgegroeid. Zijn leven lijkt bezig aan het slotakkoord; hij is weduwnaar en mist zijn vrouw; binnenkort wordt hij geëerd om zijn verdiensten voor zijn geboorteplaats. Al kijkt hij terug op een rijk leven, de dagen die voor hem liggen lijken vooral uit herinneringen te bestaan. Maar dan zijn er enkele kleine dissonanten: een aanval van een mysterieus wezen, een projectontwikkelaar met grootse plannen, een roddeljournalist op zoek naar een thema. En plots klinkt Alfreds leven anders dan hij ooit voor mogelijk had kunnen houden.

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2000 years ago four travellers enter the Judaean desert to fast and pray for their lost souls. In the blistering heat and barren rocks they encounter the evil merchant Musa who holds them in his power. Yet there is also another faint figure in the distance, fasting for 40 days, a Galilean who, they say, has the power to work miracles.