Works by
Jim Crace
(Writer)
[March 1, 1946 - ]

Fiction

• All That Follows: A Novel   (April 20, 2010 release)
  The prodigiously talented Jim Crace returns with a powerful new novel that juxtaposes the complexities of love and violence with the same brilliance that garnered major critical acclaim for The Pesthouse.
  
  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 has 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 from one of England's brightest literary lights.

• The Pesthouse (2007)
  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.

• Six(2003)
  Also known as Genesis.
  The timid life of actor Felix Dern is uncorrupted by Hollywood, where his success has not yet been shackled with any intrusive fame. But in the theaters and the restaurants of his own city, "Lix" is celebrated and admired for his looks, for his voice, and for his unblemished private life. He has succeeded in courting popularity everywhere, this handsome hero of the left, this charming darling of the right, this ever-twisting weather vane.
  
  A perfect life? No, he is blighted. He has been blighted since his teens, for every woman he sleeps with bears his child. So now it is Mouetta's turn. Their baby's due in May. Lix wants to say he feels besieged. Another child? To be so fertile is a curse...
  
  In Genesis, Jim Crace, 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.

• The Devil's Larder (2001)
  The Devil's Larder is a cumulative novel in sixty-four parts, all on the subject of food. Crace's readers might learn that little is to be trusted about food from these hilarious, delightful and subversive ingredients, but they will encounter a startling and touching patchwork portrait of a community where meals are served with lashings of passion and recipes come spiced with unexpected challenges and hopes.

• Being Dead (1999) -- Winner National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award (USA)
  Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. Instead, they are battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their corpses lie undiscovered and rotting for a week, prey to sand crabs, flies, and gulls. Yet there remains something touching about the scene, with Joseph's hand curving lightly around his wife's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."
  
  "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."
  
  From that moment forward, Being Dead becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death.

• Quarantine (1997) - Winner Whitbread Novel of the Year; A Booker finalist
  A controversial novel of faith and mystery about a group of desert travelers and their encounter with Jesus.
  
  Quarantine is Jim Crace's imaginative and powerful retelling of Christ's fabled 40-day fast in the desert. In Crace's account, Jesus travels to a cluster of arid caves where he crosses paths with a small group of exiles who are on a pilgrimage to find redemption. One wealthy and manipulative quarantiner recognizes characteristics in Christ that he believes are divine. Evoking the strangeness and beauty of the desert landscape, Crace provocatively interprets one of our most important stories.

• Signals of Distress (1994) -- Winner Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize
  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 innful 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 Publisher's 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.

• Arcadia (1992)
  For Victor's 80th birthday his right-hand man Rook prepares a country feast in the heart of the city. But Victor is making preparations of his own: to dismiss Rook and to leave an indelible mark on the city before he dies.

• The Gift of Stones (1988) -- Winner GAP International Prize for Literature (USA)
  Set before the advent of the Bronze Age, The Gift of Stones centers around a community of stoneworkers who live in a village near the sea. Wealthy and complacent, they survive by the trade of their unrivaled skills, secure in the supremacy of their craftsmenship. A small boy, outcast by misfortune, ventures from the confines of the enclave to explore the unknown. He returns with enchanting tales of ships and the seashore, of new vistas and horizons, that beguile and disturb the villagers. In spite of his words and intuitive wisodm, the stoneworkers remain oblivious to the winds of change beginning to blow in the outside world. Until, that is, the storyteller brings back to the village a strange and angry woman whose presence foretells the coming of metal, the end of stone, and the demise of their way of life.

• Continent (1986) -- Winner Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award; David Higham Prize for Fiction; and Guardian Fiction Prize
  This novel explores the tribes and communities, conflicts and superstitions, flora and fauna of a wholly spellbinding place: an imaginary seventh continent. In these seven tales Jim Crace travels a strange and wonderful landscape, as fabulous as it is eerily familiar.

Short Stories

• The Slow Digestions of the Night (1995)

Other

• Love, Hate & Kicking Ass (Digital - Mar 13, 2007)
  "As a general rule, it is unwise for novelists to try to explain their own books. However, the writing of The Pesthouse was a challenging and surprising experience and one which left me slightly baffled by myself and by the mischievous powers of narrative. Here is my attempt to understand the mystery." -- Jim Crace

• Introduction 6: Stories by New Writers (1977)
  See "Helter Skelter, Hang Sorrow, Care’ll Kill a Cat"

See also:

• Biography - Jim Crace (2007)
  An article from: Contemporary Authors by Gale Reference Team (Digital - HTML)

• Jim Crace (2007) by Philip Tew

• Jim Crace. Genesis. (Book Review): An article from: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (2005) by Thomas Hove
  (Digital - HTML)

• "Jim Crace": A Biographical Essay from Gale's "Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 231, British Novelists since 1960, 4th Series" (2003)
  Digital