false 13843 92559 0312275420 9780312275426 151 <![CDATA[Being Dead: A Novel]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249182m/92559.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249182s/92559.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92559.Being_Dead_A_Novel 3.67 901
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. Celice and Joseph would have been delighted with the description: she was a zoologist and he was an oceanographer, and they spent their lives with their eyes to the microscope, observing the phenomena of life and death. Some readers might find this gruesome, but the facts of death are told in such glorious prose that these descriptions in no way detract from the enjoyment of the book.

After her parents do not return home, their daughter, Syl, must search the morgues and follow up John and Jane Doe reports until she is finally asked to make an identification of the remains in the dunes. We then discover that the reader has had a more intimate relationship with them in death than Syl ever had with them in life.

This small gem of a book, not really a mystery in the usual sense, will stay with you long after you finish.]]> 13843 3.57 2346 421 1999 92555 0385520751 9780385520751 121 <![CDATA[The Pesthouse]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249173m/92555.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249173s/92555.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92555.The_Pesthouse 3.36 448 Jim Crace is a writer of spectacular originality and a command of language that moves a reader effortlessly into the world of his imagination. In The Pesthouse he imagines an America of the future where a man and a woman trek across a devastated and dangerous landscape, finding strength in each other and an unexpected love.

Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States is now a lawless, scantly populated wasteland. The machines have stopped. The government has collapsed. Farmlands lie fallow and the soil is contaminated by toxins. Across the country, families have packed up their belongings to travel eastward toward the one hope left: passage on a ship to Europe.

Franklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, are only days away from the ocean when Franklin, nearly crippled by an inflamed knee, is forced to stop. In the woods near his temporary refuge, Franklin comes upon an isolated stone building. Inside he finds Margaret, a woman with a deadly infection and confined to the Pesthouse to sweat out her fever. Tentatively, the two join forces and make their way through the ruins of old America. Confronted by bandits rounding up men for slavery, finding refuge in the Ark, a religious community that makes bizarre demands on those they shelter, Franklin and Margaret find their wariness of each other replaced by deep trust and an intimacy neither one has ever experienced before.

The Pesthouse is Jim Crace’s most compelling novel to date. Rich in its understanding of America’s history and ethos, it is a paean to the human spirit.

]]> 13843 3.57 2346 421 2007 92557 0312199511 9780312199517 58 <![CDATA[Quarantine: A Novel]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249180m/92557.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249180s/92557.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92557.Quarantine_A_Novel 3.55 374
Yet Crace is hardly the jeering materialist we might expect. As Jesus takes to his cliff-top cave, the author renders his religious transports without a hint of irony, and with a linguistic elegance that can hardly be called disrespectful: 'The prayers were in command of him. He shouted out across the valley, happy with the noise he made. The common words lost hold of sound. The consonants collapsed. He called on god to join him in the cave with all the noises that his lips could make. He called with all the voices in his throat.' And while most of the temptations of Christ are visited upon him by humans -- by the motley crew of his cave-dwelling neighbours -- he resists them with what we can only call superhuman will. Quarantine does, of course, operate on a fairly realistic plane. Jesus dies of starvation long before his forty-day fast is complete, and his fellow retreatants, who take centre stage throughout much of the novel, are much too confused and brutal ever to figure in any Sunday school pageant. Still, Crace leaves at least the possibility of resurrection intact at the end, which should ensure that his brilliant book will rattle both believers and non-believers alike.]]> 13843 3.57 2346 421 1997 92332 0312420897 9780312420895 16 <![CDATA[The Devil's Larder: A Feast]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171245624m/92332.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171245624s/92332.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92332.The_Devil_s_Larder_A_Feast 3.80 153 The Devil's Larder, Jim Crace has put together an odd and artful little volume that encompasses more of the human experience than it really ought to, given its size and scope. Crace presents us with 64 short fictions about food, which add up to a picture of life that is at once diabolical and innocent, creepily sexualized and free of judgment. In one fable, a mother and her small daughter twist their tongues together, ferreting out the food in each other's mouths: they want to know if food tastes the same from another person's tongue. A game of strip fondue ends with guests covered in burns where the molten cheese has fallen onto their naked flesh. "A gasp of pain. The whiff of sizzling flesh and hair and cheese." Flesh and cheese, that's the stuff. Crace shows us the odd outer limits of desire, and revels in the sheer weirdness of the daily act of eating. --Claire Dederer]]> 13843 3.57 2346 421 2001 92558 014101234X 9780141012346 15 <![CDATA[The Gift of Stones]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249181m/92558.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249181s/92558.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92558.The_Gift_of_Stones 3.78 86 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.

]]> 13843 3.57 2346 421 1988 92561 0141005440 9780141005447 6 <![CDATA[Continent]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249183m/92561.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249183s/92561.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92561.Continent 3.73 55 13843 3.57 2346 421 1987 24599 0140276009 9780140276008 4 <![CDATA[Arcadia]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167540768m/24599.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167540768s/24599.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24599.Arcadia 3.43 47 13843 3.57 2346 421 1992 262157 0312424426 9780312424428 5 <![CDATA[Signals of Distress: A Novel]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173232633m/262157.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173232633s/262157.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/262157.Signals_of_Distress_A_Novel 3.50 38 </div>]]> 13843 3.57 2346 421 1994 92556 0312423896 9780312423896 5 <![CDATA[Genesis]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249177m/92556.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249177s/92556.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92556.Genesis 2.74 39 A major new novel about sex and the citizen by the award-winning author of Being Dead

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.
</div>]]> 13843 3.57 2346 421 2003 92560 0140275991 9780140275995 1 <![CDATA[Six]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249182m/92560.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249182s/92560.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92560.Six 3.12 16 Six, is an unfortunately fertile actor and singer. "Every woman he dares to sleep with bears his child"--from the older neighbour who took his virginity and Frieda, his love in radical student days, to his portly Catholic first wife Alicja and a vacuous, surgically enhanced costar with whom he had a one off tryst. "Lix" has, in fact, "never slept with anyone without--eventually--a pregnancy" occurring. And as the novel opens, his second wife Mouetta, has just become pregnant with what will be his sixth and, we are told, last child, (hence the title).

Reductively, the book could be described as a kind of "Lix: A Life and Loves", or, as it tells the story of each of his pollinations, "Lix: A Life of Life Making". However, this is not a book that yields easily to a reductive summary. Lix, who, symbolically, has a pronounced birthmark on his cheek, may play Don Juan on the stage but despite his fertility he is not actually a voracious sexual conquistador; timidity is a recurring character flaw. Crace's spare, meticulous dissection of Lix's life, delivered in understated, truly poetic prose, ultimately forms a haunting, and occasionally erotic, meditation on those eternal sexual conundrums: love, gender, power, fertility and desire.

Like his earlier work Arcadia, the setting here is an imaginary, contemporary city--known variously throughout the book as the City of Balconies, the City of Kisses and the City of Mathematical Truth. The topography is at once familiar yet unerringly strange. Lix and his partners orbit a cityscape of plush suburbs, restaurants and cafes but references, opaque and transparent, to riots, floods, political repression and economic instability gives this powerful novel about sex, lovemaking, marriage and children an eerily dystopian hue. --Travis Elborough

]]> 13843 3.57 2346 421 2003 7101665 0641938462 9780641938467 0 <![CDATA[Devil's Larder]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7101665-devil-s-larder 0.0 0 13843 3.57 2346 421 1901 7101664 0641844379 9780641844379 0 <![CDATA[Devil's Larder]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7101664-devil-s-larder 0.0 0 13843 3.57 2346 421 1901 6937739 038552076X 9780385520768 0 <![CDATA[All That Follows: A Novel]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6937739-all-that-follows 0.0 0 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.]]> 13843 3.57 2346 421 2010 2016759 1897774842 0 <![CDATA[Booker Prize Shortlist 1997 - Selected Readings]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2016759.Booker_Prize_Shortlist_1997_Selected_Readings 0.0 0 13843 3.57 2346 421 147895 3.50 320 40 217279 3.70 186 45 1997 3483953 0224036165 9780224036160 0 <![CDATA[Untitled Crace]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3483953.Untitled_Crace 0.0 0 13843 3.57 2346 421 0 3483954 0140252029 9780140252026 0 <![CDATA[The Slow Digestions of the Night]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3483954.The_Slow_Digestions_of_the_Night 0.0 0 13843 3.57 2346 421 1995