Kirjahaku

Jim Crace's imaginative first book, seven linked stories, now available in a deluxe paperback edition in Ecco's The Art of the Story Series"Makes us see our own world more clearly . . . brilliant, provocative and delightful" --the New York TimesJim Crace's internationally acclaimed first book explores the tribes and communities, conflicts and superstitions, flora and fauna of a wholly spellbinding place: an imaginary seventh continent. In these seven tales Crace travels a strange and wonderful landscape: "Talking Skull" takes the reader to a tiny agricultural village renowned for the sexually-charged, mystical milk of its calves; "Electricity" introduces a remote flatland region where a monumental ceiling fan changes an entire town's attitude toward modernization. From the acacia scrub of the flatlands to a city bazaar jammed with vegetable stalls, tourists, and beggars, Crace's invented world is as fabulous as it is eerily familiar.

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.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE - SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE - In this hauntingly evoked portrait of rural life, Jim Crace skillfully unravels the delicate fabric of a community in the wake of economic progress. "In his compassionate curiosity and his instincts for insurgent uncertainty, Crace surely ranks among our greatest novelists of radical upheaval, a perfect fit for our unstable, unforgiving age." --The New York Times Book ReviewOn 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.

Winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year and a Booker finalist: a controversial novel of faith and mystery about a group of desert travellers 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.

A National Book Critics Circle Awards Winner From the author of Quarantine comes Being Dead, Jim Crace's haunting novel about love, death, and the afterlife.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 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.

November, 1836. A fierce gale beaches an American sail ship off the English coast, injuring an African slave below decks and eventually disgorging 300 head of cattle and rowdy American sailors into a hardscrabble fishing village. The same storm drives into port a steamer, bearing one Aymer Smith, the foolish well-intentioned prig who will deprive the town of its livelihood, free the African slave, and set into motion a whole series of unforeseeable, tragicomic events. One of the most seductive and surprising novelist at work today, once again creates a richly strange and believable world, uncannily familiar to our own.

The inspiration behind the Major Motion Picture starring Caleb Landry Jones'Extraordinary' - The Guardian'Inimitably excellent' - Boyd Tonkin, IndependentAs late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders - two men and a dangerously magnetic woman - arrives on the woodland borders triggering a series of events that will see Walter Thirsk's village unmade in just seven days: the harvest blackened by smoke and fear, cruel punishment meted out to the innocent, and allegations of witchcraft.But something even darker is at the heart of Walter's story, and he will be the only man left to tell it . . .‘Terrible, lyrical, beauty that is nothing like any other novel I have ever read' - Spectator'He is, quite simply, one of the great writers of our time’ - Colum McCannWinner of the James Tait Black PrizeWinner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary AwardShortlisted for the Man Booker PrizeShortlisted for the Goldsmiths PrizeShortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

‘Hard and actual in observation, clearly and richly imagined, remarkably original’ Guardian A novel in seven stories, Continent is an exploration of the cultures, communities and natural life of an entirely imaginary realm. Built on rich seams of myth and metaphor, this new, seventh continent is strange, atmospheric and yet not wholly a mirage, for its inhabitants are disarmingly familiar, known to us through their loves, their hopes and their struggles to make sense of life. On its first publication over twenty years ago, this spellbinding book marked the arrival of one of the most inventive minds at work in modern fiction. ‘Fuses folklore and political parable, moral fable and myth, into something rather original and also very modern’ The Times ‘Makes us see our own world more clearly . . . brilliant, provocative and delightful’ New York Times

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.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.

Winter 1836, and the Belle of Wilmington discharges its doomed crew on Wherrytown. Little daunted, the Captain and his sailors flirt, drink and brawl their way through the village, marooned along with Aymer Smith, a virgin and a blunderer in search of a wife. As vivid and alive as characters by Dickens, these men play out their dreams against a haunting, monumental landscape, bringing the New World back to the Old, with fresh discoveries, fresh hazards, fresh hopes. 'The passions and mores of the 1830s are flawlessly delineated in this masterly novel, imbued with the tang and power of the sea' Independent

The Devil's Larder is a novel in sixty-four parts, exploring our deepest human concerns - love, hate, hopes and desires - through our relationship with food. Packed with delightful and subversive ingredients, with behaviour more suited to the bedroom than to the table, and with the most curious and idosyncratic of diners, this is a sensuous portrait of a community where meals are served with lashings of passion and recipes come spiced with unexpected challenges and hopes. 'Delicious . . . the sheer quantity of inventiveness is astounding' Mail on Sunday 'Funny, frightening and erotic' The Times

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.

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.

*Winner of the Whitbread Novel Award**Shortlisted for the Booker Prize*‘Dazzling, gritty brilliance’ – Sunday Times‘Completely captivating’ – Literary ReviewJim Crace's provocative retelling of Jesus' forty day fast in the desert is a classic that tampers with tradition. Moving and fascinating in equal measure, Quarantine is a stunningly realized novel from one of the great writers of our time. Under an endless and unforgiving sky, five travellers venture into the Judean wilderness in search of redemption. Instead, amidst the barren rocks, they are met by a dangerous man, Musa, and fall under his dark influence. As the unforgiving days and bitter nights erode their resolve, it becomes clear that one among them will go further than the rest: a fervent, solitary figure, he denies the temptations of his neighbours, and, ultimately, the needs of his own body.‘One of the finest novels I’ve read in years’ – The Times‘Crace’s desert shimmers with a sense of the miraculous’– Express on Sunday‘Stunning. A writer of hallucinatory skill’ – John Updike

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD. A couple lie naked in the dunes at Baritone Bay, at the spot where, almost thirty years before, they had first had sex as students. Nostalgia has sent Celice and Joseph back to their singing stretch of coast, but in the seeming calm of the afternoon they meet a brutal and unexpected fate – one which will still their bodies but not their love, and certainly not their story.Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award A couple lie naked in the dunes at Baritone Bay, at the spot where, almost thirty years before, they had first had sex as students. Nostalgia has sent Celice and Joseph back to their singing stretch of coast, but in the seeming calm of the afternoon they meet a brutal and unexpected fate – one which will still their bodies but not their love, and certainly not their story.

A devastated America exists in an imagined future. Its technologies are forgotten, its communities have splintered and its refugees, reversing the course of history, travel eastwards in search of safety and a new start. Among them are Franklin and Margaret, young, bereft, forced together by circumstance; but finding that love, courage and determination can endure even as a country breaks slowly apart.