'No one is better . . . eden sees Crace at the top of his game' - Telegraph Trouble has come to the garden. Its inhabitants live an eternal and unblemished life, tending to the bountiful fields, orchards and lakes, and serving their angelic masters. But now one of the gardeners has escaped, breaching the walls and making her way into the world beyond; a land of poverty, sickness and death - as well as liberty. The angels know there are those who would go to the ends of the earth to find her. Perhaps another fall is coming . . . 'Vivid and poetic . . . Crace writes with great flair and inimitable imagination' - Financial Times 'Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should all be thankful' - Spectator

'No one is better . . . eden sees Crace at the top of his game' - Telegraph Trouble has come to the garden. Its inhabitants live an eternal and unblemished life, tending to the bountiful fields, orchards and lakes, and serving their angelic masters. But now one of the gardeners has escaped, breaching the walls and making her way into the world beyond; a land of poverty, sickness and death - as well as liberty. The angels know there are those who would go to the ends of the earth to find her. Perhaps another fall is coming . . . 'Vivid and poetic . . . Crace writes with great flair and inimitable imagination' - Financial Times 'Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should all be thankful' - Spectator

'No one is better . . . eden sees Crace at the top of his game' - Telegraph Trouble has come to the garden. Its inhabitants live an eternal and unblemished life, tending to the bountiful fields, orchards and lakes, and serving their angelic masters. But now one of the gardeners has escaped, breaching the walls and making her way into the world beyond; a land of poverty, sickness and death - as well as liberty. The angels know there are those who would go to the ends of the earth to find her. Perhaps another fall is coming . . . 'Vivid and poetic . . . Crace writes with great flair and inimitable imagination' - Financial Times 'Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should all be thankful' - Spectator

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.

FROM THE MAN BOOKER SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF HARVEST 'The Melody takes its place among his finest [novels] . . . an ecological fable for modern times' Guardian 'Seductively atmospheric . . . deeply moving' Daily Mail 'Brilliant' Observer Alfred Busi, famed in his town for his music and songs, is mourning the recent death of his wife and quietly living out his days in the large villa he has always called home. Then one night Busi is attacked by a creature he disturbs as it raids the contents of his larder. Busi is convinced that what assaulted him was no animal, but a child, 'innocent and wild', and his words fan the flames of old rumour - of an ancient race of people living in the bosk surrounding the town - and new controversy: the town's paupers, the feral wastrels at its edges, must be dealt with. Once and for all. Lyrical and warm, intimate and epic, The Melody by Jim Crace tracks the few days that will see Busi and the town he loves altered irrevocably. This is a story about grief and ageing, about reputation and the loss of it, about love and music and the peculiar way myth seeps into real life. And it is a political novel too - a rallying cry to protect those we persecute.

From the Man Booker shortlisted author of Harvest.

Alfred Busi, famed in his town for his music and songs, is mourning the recent death of his wife and quietly living out his days in the large villa he has always called home. Then one night Busi is attacked by a creature he disturbs as it raids the contents of his larder. Busi is convinced that what assaulted him was no animal, but a child, ‘innocent and wild’, and his words fan the flames of old rumour – of an ancient race of people living in the bosk surrounding the town – and new controversy: the town’s paupers, the feral wastrels at its edges, must be dealt with. Once and for all.

Lyrical and warm, intimate and epic, The Melody by Jim Crace tracks the few days that will see Busi and the town he loves altered irrevocably. This is a story about grief and ageing, about reputation and the loss of it, about love and music and the peculiar way myth seeps into real life. And it is a political novel too – a rallying cry to protect those we persecute.

Winner of the 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize Shortlisted for the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize Shortlisted for the 2014 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction As 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 . . .

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.

""Signals of Distress" is an engrossing book...Crace is a genius at making round and really human characters, and his characters make his novel superb."--"Newsday"
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.
"One of the brightest lights in contemporary British fiction. With beguiling narrative ease and prose lyric enough to invest the most ordinary events with mystery, Mr. Crace...lays bare the commonplace events-always unrecorded-that crystallize later as 'history.'"-- Charles Johnson, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Crace weaves a progressive magic into this mythic plot with masterful detail, luminous prose and haunting characterization."--"The Boston Globe"
JIM CRACE is the author of seven other novels, including "Being Dead," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and, most recently, "Genesis," He lives in Birmingham, England.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.