Jim Crace

A haunting new novel about love, death, and the afterlife, from the author of Quarantine 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,...

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...

Signals of Distress tells the story of an American emigration vessel grounded off the coast of England in the 1830's. While the Belle of Wilmington waits to be refloated, the isolated community of Wherrytown offers what hospitality it can to the crew, but the Americans prove to be a disturbing presence. A brilliantly imagined historical fiction about emigration, dislocation, and the price of liberty, this novel confirms Crace's reputation as a writer...

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 Times Jim 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...

Aside from his trusty piano, Alfred Busi lives alone in his villa overlooking the waves. Famed in his town for his music and songs, he is mourning the recent death of his wife and quietly living out his days, occasionally performing the classics in small venues--never in the stadiums he could fill when in his prime. On the night before receiving his town's highest honor, Busi is wrested from bed by noises in his courtyard and then stunned by an attacking...