Jim Crace

This web site was launched in January 2000
and has had over 150,000 visitors.

Highlights to Jan 2013 include:

In a video talk published by the Ransom Center
Jim Crace speaks about ephemera in archives
and the stories they evoke,
such as the piece of driftwood with a note on it
that was later incorporated into his novel Signals of Distress (1996).

Visit the Ransom Center’s Facebook page by July 13
for a chance to win a signed copy of Crace’s Continent.

Jim Crace will be in residence this fall
at the Michener Center for Writers
at The University of Texas at Austin and
will give a public reading on December 6.

How the Light Gets In:
Jim Crace at Hay-on-Wye

Jim Crace will be in conversation with
Mark Haddon, Michael Symmons Roberts
and online editor of Granta magazine Ted Hodgkinson

on 5 June from 2.30 pm at the ‘How the Light Gets In’ festival grounds,
Globe at Hay, Newport Street, Hay-on-Wye HR3 5BG

“Our humour ripens as the barley falls...”

Preview Jim Crace’s new novel in Granta 119

The current (pub. May 14) issue of Granta features
‘Enclosure’, a chapter from Jim Crace’s forthcoming novel Harvest.
With the harvest gathered in, the time for feasting has come,
but there are changes on the horizon
that will reshape the community’s tomorrows.

‘Enclosure’ imagines rural England on the brink of sweeping change.

Granta 119 is available from bookshops or online.

Harvest will be published in 2013

New essay on ‘Being Dead’

Jim Crace’s award-winning 1999 novel of ‘belief, death and the search for transcendence’
has inspired numerous critics and readers (visit the Being Dead page
for a summary, discussion and extracts from selected reviews).
Now Stephen Palmer has written an exploration of the novel’s ‘liminal space’.

‘Dead but not departed yet’
is published in March 2012 in the journal Mortality.

Stephen Palmer writes:

“This piece grew out of an increasing fascination with the book,
and from an abiding interest in the presence of the dead in our culture.
It takes as its starting point the notion of liminality
as developed by the anthropologist Victor S. Turner,
and employs this in an exploration of Being Dead
as both a representation of aspects of the liminal state,
and as itself a kind of ritualised response (a sort of mourning, perhaps)
prompted by Crace's own experience of death.”

To read an abstract of the essay, visit Mortality.
A limited number of copies are available from the author:
please contact aghewitt@yahoo.com and I will forward your request.

Jim Crace at Pordenonelegge

Jim Crace will be appearing at Pordenonelegge,
Italy’s most important literary festival, on 17 September.
Held in the northern Italian town of Pordenone,
the three-day festival features over a hundred writers
and cultural figures from Italy and around the world.
This year the UK is represented by Jim Crace and V.S. Naipaul.
For more information, visit www.pordenonelegge.it (website in Italian)

The Ransom Centre has completed its catalogue
of the Jim Crace archive acquired in 2008.

The archive comprises 46 document boxes
of manuscripts, correspondence, proofs, scrapbooks,
research notes and other materials.
It was processed by Amy Armstrong.

View the complete inventory online.

All That Follows is now available in paperback
and in a Kindle edition from Amazon

Jim Crace at the Jaipur Festival

Vishal Tayade of the online magazine
Indian Ruminations interviewed Jim Crace
about how his writing has changed over the years,
his favourite Indian writers, and many other topics.

Read the interview at Indian Ruminations.

The New Delhi-based tehelka.com
interviewed Jim Crace about his passion
for literature, politics and journalism
during his recent appearance at
the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Watch the video on YouTube

(will open in a new window)

Jim Crace at Bath Literature Festival

On 3 March Jim Crace will be speaking about “My Craft”
at the Bath Literature Festival.

The Festival brings together novelists
including Kazuo Ishiguro and Andrea Levy,
poets such as Christopher Reid,
and a host of other writers, artists, and performers
for a ten-day celebration of literature today.

For more information please visit the Festival web site:
http://www.bathlitfest.org.uk

From the programme:

My Craft

Thursday 3 March

Jim Crace: Being Dead

11.15am–12.15pm, Guildhall

Jim Crace is one of our finest novelists. In Being Dead,
a couple lie naked in the dunes at Baritone Bay…
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.
The Literary Review called it “A work of near-genius”.
They are wrong about the “near”.

Reviews of Jim Crace’s new novel
All That Follows

“Thought-provoking and a delight to read”

Reviewing All That Follows in The Guardian,
fellow novelist Giles Foden found the novel’s “modesty” attractive:

“the way it gets big ideas down to a small domestic canvas
on which individual emotions and family dynamics
are authentically realised. This, the novel seems to be saying,
is where politics matters...” Foden wonders if the novel is trying to offer
“the new language for space-time called for by [jazz pianist and Crace mentor] Roy Fisher
...an evocation of being, location and history
that takes into account the lessons of modernism and relativity...
ideally producing in one person the sort of flexible consciousness
that might properly confront wider effects such as climate change...
No novelist today could have chosen a more original way
of confronting this challenge, and plenty are trying.”

“The writing about music is matchless”, Foden says,
but Crace is “not unaware that the proposition that jazz can save the world
is itself subject to satire” and “brings a rare humour”
to this story of a political re-awakening.

Read Giles Foden’s review on The Guardian website

“A magician among contemporary British novelists”

“Crace shows real edge and distinction in his writing,”
says Ian Thomson in the Financial Times (12 April).
The protagonist of All That Follows, Lennie,
“is emblematic of bourgeois English liberalism.
Though outwardly leftist in his politics, he is too polite and hesitant
to be readily militant on the streets, yet craves action
and a clarion-call to arms. One evening, unexpectedly,
he finds it while watching the news on television...”
Thomson praises the new novel “both for its mesmeric story-telling
and the matchless quality of its prose...Crace’s is a unique voice.”

Please visit ft.com to read the entire review

“A novel about the political life itself”

Edmund Gordon in the Times Literary Supplement (16 April) sees
“a fundamental change of approach”
in the new novel, which engages more directly
than Crace’s previous books
with politics and the “cost of living with political principles”.
While unsure of Crace’s “grasp of realist technique”,
Gordon concludes that the novel succeeds in
“its portrayal of a successful artist who doubts the significance of a life devoted to art...
[the conflict] between the daring of Leonard’s music
and the timidity of his beliefs...is handled with subtlety...
This least characteristic [of Crace’s books] may also be his most revealing.”

Jim Crace will be appearing/reading at the following events:

3 March: Bath Literature Festival

Update on the literary archive of Jim Crace
at the University of Texas

In 2008 the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
at The University of Texas at Austin
acquired the archive of Jim Crace.

Date: April 14, 2010

Ransom Center Opens Archive of Prize-winning Writer Jim Crace

AUSTIN, Texas — The papers of British writer Jim Crace, author of acclaimed works "Continent" (1986), "Arcadia" (1992), "Quarantine" (1997), "Being Dead" (1999) and "The Pesthouse" (2007), are now open at the Harry Ransom Center. A finding aid of the collection can be accessed online.

The Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, acquired Crace's archive in 2008. The collection is made up of more than 45 boxes of materials, including the research notes, early drafts and edited page proofs of "All That Follows" (2010), Crace's novel that is being released [in the USA] on April 20.

The archive contains all of Crace's manuscripts of his novels, stories, plays and essays. The collection also includes notes and outlines for works, reviews, trade journals, radio plays, art work, recordings, press clippings, juvenilia, correspondence and a proposal for two novels, "The Finalist" and "Archipelago."

"Continent," Crace's first novel, earned the Whitbread First Novel Award, the David Higham Prize for fiction and the Guardian Fiction Award. Crace has continued to receive prestigious awards for his works. His novel "Being Dead" received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and "Quarantine" was Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

"It is with excitement and delight that the Center serves as a home for my own archive, spanning everything from first childhood attempts at fiction and teenage poems through 17 years of journalism and nine published novels to page drafts of my current ongoing book (partly set in Austin) and watercolour sketches for an upcoming fictional memoir," said Crace. "It is, of course, strange and even a little distressing to part with so many valued and familiar papers—but I am certain that it is better that they are available and cared for in the Ransom Center than boxed and shut away in the attic of our house in Birmingham, England. No writer could wish for more than to be allocated a corner in such a fine, important and world-class collection."

‘The Bald and the Beautiful’

Thank you to Dr Nicola Allen for allowing publication here
of her recent essay on the image
of the shaven-haired woman in the fiction of Jim Crace.

According to Dr Allen,
characters such as Syl from Being Dead and Margaret from The Pesthouse
draw on a long aesthetic tradition in which the shaven-haired woman is
“a physical incarnation of trauma and/or sacrifice”.
In Crace’s treatment, however, these characters
“serve as more universal, less gender-specific points of identification”, while still evoking
“a sense of common human frailty”
through the association of hairlessness with suffering.

Dr Allen’s thought-provoking investigation first appeared in Critical Engagement 2.2.

Jim Crace’s new novel All That Follows

was launched 1 April 2010
at the London Review of Books bookshop

Read an extract
from All That Follows
here

Please see Note on copyright at the bottom of this contents page.

This site is for information about the writer Jim Crace.

Much archived material, including interviews, uncollected short stories, excerpts from novels,
journalism and comment, can be found by following the link to Highlights,
or using the section headings in the left-hand frame.

Being Dead film stalls
due to funding difficulties

Sad to report that work on the film of Being Dead
has apparently stalled due to a shortage of funds.

Both Ray Lawrence, the film’s director,
and a spokeswoman for producer Emile Sherman
have confirmed that Being Dead is on hold
following the withdrawal of a “key component of the funding”.

The catalogue of the Literary Archive
of Jim Crace

In 2008 the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
at The University of Texas at Austin
acquired the archive of Jim Crace.

The archive contains all of Crace's manuscripts,
not just of his novels but of stories, plays and essays.
The collection also includes notes and outlines for works,
reviews, trade journals, radio plays, art work,
recordings, press clippings, juvenilia, correspondence
and a proposal for two novels.

A catalogue of this material has been prepared
by John W. Wronoski and Don Lindgren of the Center and is available
on the ‘Other Writings’ page or by following this link.
It is fascinating to browse through this list of Jim Crace’s
literary output and projects.

Many thanks to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
for allowing us to make the catalogue available on this site.

Ray Lawrence to direct Being Dead film

The film of Jim Crace’s 2001 novel Being Dead will be directed by Ray Lawrence (Lantana, Jindabyne).
The novel begins with the murder on an isolated beach of husband and wife Joseph and Celice.
Different strands describe the events leading up to the murder, the beginnings of Joseph and Celice’s love,
and the efforts of their daughter Syl to find them once they go missing.
The novel has been adapted for the screen by Beatrix Christian, who worked on Jindabyne.

In the novel, the murder is an opportunistic act: Joseph and Celice are truly in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Nevertheless they share a terrible secret about the death of a fellow-student many years ago.
Early indications are that Lawrence and Christian’s version may focus on this “dark secret history”.

“Being Dead is classic Ray Lawrence relationship territory - an intelligent and deeply satisfying murder mystery
in the same vein as Lantana,” said Ruth Harley, chief executive of Screen Australia, which is backing the film.

The film will be set in Australia.

Jim Crace in Austin, Texas, in January 2008.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
at The University of Texas at Austin
has acquired the archive of Jim Crace.

The archive contains all of Crace's manuscripts,
not just of his novels but of stories, plays and essays.
The collection also includes notes and outlines for works,
reviews, trade journals, radio plays, art work,
recordings, press clippings, juvenilia, correspondence
and a proposal for two novels, The Finalist and Archipelago.

The Crace materials will be accessible once organized and housed.

“A quintessential American story”

The paperback edition of The Pesthouse
was released in the United States on 6 May.

To read extracts from UK and American reviews
of Jim Crace’s novel, click here

University of Texas acquires Crace archive

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
at The University of Texas at Austin
has acquired the archive of Jim Crace.

The archive contains all of Crace's manuscripts,
not just of his novels but of stories, plays and essays.
The collection also includes notes and outlines for works,
reviews, trade journals, radio plays, art work,
recordings, press clippings, juvenilia, correspondence
and a proposal for two novels, The Finalist and Archipelago.

"Earlier this year I had the good fortune
to pick my way through the riches of the Ransom Center in Austin,
including notebooks and illustrations by my personal favourites
— William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T. H. White,"
said Crace, who was Writer-in-Residence at Austin in January 2008.
"It was an enlightening and immensely moving experience.

"So it is with excitement and delight
that I learn that the Center will also provide a home for my own archive,
spanning everything from first childhood attempts at fiction
and teenage poems through 17 years of journalism
and nine published novels
to page drafts of my current ongoing book
(partly set in Austin) and watercolour sketches
for an upcoming fictional memoir.
It is, of course, strange and even a little distressing
to part with so many valued and familiar papers —
but I am certain that it is better that they are available
and cared for in the Ransom Center
than boxed and shut away in the attic of our house
in Birmingham, England.
No writer could wish for more than to be allocated a corner
in such a fine, important and world-class collection."

The Crace materials will be accessible once organized and housed.

Crace in Austin, winter 2008

March 2008

“The novel vividly imagines the Judean desert,
a comfortless place of bleaching light.
But it also creates a strange linguistic space…”

John Mullan, professor of English at University College London,
discusses Jim Crace’s Quarantine
in the Guardian book club series.

To read the first article, click here.

You can access subsequent instalments in the book club series
including readers’ reactions to Quarantine
directly from the Guardian website.

To read Jim Crace’s contribution to the discussion,
describing the origins of Quarantine in a care hostel in Birmingham,
click here.

Feb 2008

“It’s about two kinds of heroism…”

Jim Crace discusses writer’s block,
the pleasures of a life in storytelling,
and his projected novel about American and British kinds of bravery
with Shawn Badgley of the Austin Chronicle.

To read the interview, please click here.

Jan 2008

A New Year’s round-up
of reflections and memories:

On a childhood Christmas

On the first memorable novel

In conversation with Joan Bakewell on belief

and see Jim Crace’s pick of bird books in Best Books

Nov 2007

“We’re all, to some extent, autobiographical writers…
but I’ve not been my subject-matter before…”

Jim Crace discusses his work in progress,
his approach to writing,
and the role of literature
in a podcast from the Warwick Arts Centre.
To listen, please click here.

“This novel…always leaves me in a state of rapture,
as if I’d received a revelation of my own,”

says the author and Harvard professor of creative writing
Bret Anthony Johnston of Jim Crace’s Quarantine.
To find out why, please click here.

Jim Crace will be Distinguished Writer in Residence
at the James Michener Center for Writers
at the University of Texas
from 20 Jan-20 Feb 2008.

He will give a public reading in Austin, Texas,
on 7 February 2008.

Picador, who signed a three-book deal with Jim Crace last year,
will re-issue seven novels in January 2008.

“I thought this would be my political statement and finally I would write a political book.
But the moment of abandonment came to me: this is not a lament,
it is a love song…”

Jim Crace talks about the ideas behind The Pesthouse
in an interview in The Writing Magazine (September 2007).

To download a pdf of the article, please click here

Reviews of The Pesthouse, Jim Crace’s 2007 novel

“Readers will certainly note the parallels
between The Pesthouse and Cormac McCarthy’s
recent Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road,”

says Mark Luce in the San Francisco Chronicle,
but while “McCarthy may have cornered the market on blood-red prose
that captures postapocalyptic violence and horror…
Crace provides an equally intriguing vision
that seems less frenzied but not too sanguine.”
To read the review, click here.

“How surprising of British critics
to so underestimate Crace, who is not a naïve writer…
I’d imagine that what made the book so satisfying to write
was not the chance to punish America
for its sins against nature, but rather
the appeal of making the future reverse the past
in the great eastward migration that Crace charts.”

To read Francine Prose in The (members-only) New York Times, click here

“Crace’s new America,
back to front in space and time,
is completely and rigorously imagined,
a world entire of itself...entirely compelling…
The story is a gripping, harrowing adventure tale
and Crace’s language
is extraordinary…
simple, often beautiful.”

To read Peter Bradshaw’s review of The Pesthouse in the New Statesman,

click here.

“Crace builds his effects from the bottom up
with careful details…Crace’s originality
is refreshing, his voice commanding”

Toby Lichtig in the Times Literary Supplement
finds much to admire in The Pesthouse,
but is it the epic it might have been?
Read his review in the March 9 2007 edition
(online publication is usually one month behind)

Tew on Crace

Read an extract from Philip Tew’s study of Jim Crace

Jim Crace by Professor Philip Tew
is the first full-length study of the work of the
“one of the most imaginative...adventurous and challenging”
authors of the last three decades.

Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post 1900 Literature)
in the School of Arts at Brunel University, West London.
He examines Crace’s career as a novelist
from Continent (1986) to The Pesthouse (2007).

The book is published
by Manchester University Press and available from Amazon.

To read an extract on Signals of Distress, click here

“Here is the happiness that I had counted beyond reach,
sentimental, English and suburban to the core…”

Jim Crace returns to his childhood home in Enfield

Read his account for the Sunday Times here

A phantom book by Jim Crace

Jim Crace’s new novel, Useless America,
is climbing up Amazon’s sales list…
There’s only one problem: the book doesn’t exist.
Read Jim Crace’s account of his ‘phantom book’ here

A preview of Jim Crace’s new novel

“This used to be America…the safest place on earth”

Jim Crace’s new novel The Pesthouse
is set in the “medieval future” of America.

To read the first chapter click here

New novels and a new US publisher for Jim Crace

Jim Crace has agreed a new three-novel contract in the USA
with the exclusive and prestigious literary imprint Nan A Talese.
A part of the Doubleday/Random House group,
Nan Talese already publishes Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan,
Thomas Keneally, and Peter Ackroyd,
plus celebrity writers such as Mia Farrow, Helmut Newton,
and George Plimpton.

“I have followed Jim Crace ever since I read The Gift of Stones many years ago,”
Nan Talese said, “and so it is thrilling that we now have the honour
of being his publisher. The Pesthouse is a brilliant novel,
as I am certain the two books to follow will also be.”

In an interview in January 2004 Jim Crace spoke of his plans
for an “adventurous retirement” from writing,
implying that The Pesthouse might be his last book.
All readers will be delighted with the prospect
of more novels to follow The Pesthouse.

The two new projects are
The Finalist and Archipelago.
”The Finalist”, says Crace, “is, on one level only,
a thriller of action and ideas, but its overarching intention
is to be a metaphorical critique of both political individualism
and the innate complacency of Western liberal democracies…
Archipelago is an autobiography of the imagination,
with no plainly factual elements at all.”

To visit Nan Talese’s web site click here

May 2006

“An altogether kinder, odder, safer universe”:

Jim Crace revisits James Wilcox’ comic novel Modern Baptists

To read Jim Crace’s introduction
to the new Penguin edition of Wilcox’ book,
click here

March 2006

Doubleday Canada has signed Jim Crace to its list of internationally acclaimed novelists
including M.G. Vassanji, Mark Haddon, Margaret Atwood, and David Adams Richards,
and will publish The Pesthouse in Canada to coincide with its UK appearance from Picador.

Doubleday editor Nick Massey-Garrison said:
”We’re delighted to be Mr. Crace’s first Canadian publisher and excited
by this chance to introduce him to many new readers in Canada.
The Pesthouse is built on themes that will be familiar
from Jim Crace’s previous books, and the world he creates
is every bit as vivid, but I’d say that it takes a generous narrative direction
that will appeal to readers who may not have come to the earlier books.”

Please visit this page again soon for more details
of the upcoming publication of The Pesthouse.

Jan 22 2006

“The volunteer farmers who bare their skin throughout the night and offer their blood
to the mosquitoes of Pailin
are taking grave risks for a good reason…”

Last fall the charity Médecins Sans Frontières
commissioned Jim Crace to report
on their activities in Cambodia.

To read his account, click here

or go to the Sunday Times site
where it appears in slightly edited form

Nov 18 2005

Picador will publish The Pesthouse

Jim Crace’s new novel, in spring 2007.

Picador – publishers of John Banville and Alan Hollinghurst,
winners in 2005 and 2004 respectively
of Britain’s most important literary award, the Man Booker Prize –
have announced that they will publish Crace’s next three novels,
beginning with The Pesthouse next year.
The deal was concluded earlier this week.

On behalf of Picador, Andrew Kidd said:

‘Jim Crace’s gift for dramatic compression,
combined with his astonishing imaginative range,
makes the experience of reading his books unique and unforgettable.
He is one of the finest British writers at work today,
and we are thrilled to welcome him.’

To find out more about Picador, click here.

The Pesthouse, a novel about medieval America, is near completion.
To find out more, click here.

The Devil’s Larder wins the Best of Edinburgh award

Congratulations to Grid Iron, whose production of The Devil’s Larder has won the 2005 Best of Edinburgh award
at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The award means Larder will now transfer to New York.

To read more on the award, please click here.

Grid Iron production of The Devil’s Larder
transfers to Edinburgh

Innovative theatrical company Grid Iron have made a number of explorations of the impact of food on human society, including Gargantua and Fermentation. Now Grid Iron have adapted Jim Crace’s novel The Devil’s Larder (2001) for performance:

“This promenade production winds a sinuous and treacherous path from narrative episode to story-telling, from installation to song, with live music performed by David Paul Jones and award-winning harpist, Catriona McKay. Grid Iron examine how food can act as a catalyst for unleashing our fears, desires and taboos.
Jim Crace’s teasingly dark novella is the basis for a journey into a culinary underworld; an uncanny, uncomfortable examination of the envy, love, revenge, hypocrisy, loss and lust which seethe beneath the false calm of the menu, the shopping list and the recipe…”

The Devil’s Larder premiered in Cork as part of the city’s
European Capital of Culture celebrations.
It will be in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival:
Debenham’s, Princes Street (0131-228 1404), August 9-28.

To find out more, please visit Grid Iron’s site.

For more about other theatrical adaptations of Crace’s work,
please visit Quarantine on stage and Signals of Distress on stage.

“Darwinism is one of the most exciting narratives
we can encounter…I wanted
to test the Darwinian thesis of success”

- Jim Crace in conversation with James Ohearn.

To listen to an interview with Jim Crace on Six
by Canadian broadcaster James Ohearn, please click here

Jim Crace talks to online magazine Three Monkeys

about why America is the right place

to set his new novel of the ‘medieval future’

_

Advice for aspiring writers

“One of the rewards of being a novelist
of even limited success is that several times a week,
by phone, by email, in person, you will be approached
by complete strangers - unpublished writers -
keen to obtain your help and advice.
It would be truculent and unfriendly not to respond…”

Jim Crace’s practical advice to aspiring authors,
contained in a series of hilarious letters,
is published in the Guardian Review. Click here.

November 2004:

Crossing Borders is an extremely interesting and exciting new scheme developed by the British Council, Lancaster University, and a range of partners in Africa.
Professional novelists and poets act as mentors to African writers using email and the Internet to share their work and comment on it. Crossing Borders aims to break the isolation of young African writers, promoting writing development, library usage, cultural exchange and a greater knowledge of contemporary literature in English. It also aims to support writers in the UK who work as mentors on the scheme, enriching their literary and cultural experience.

To find out more, click here.

Jim Crace is one of the programme’s “Writers on Writing” contributors. The site contains
a link to his short story “The Prospect from the Silver Hill”, an analysis of his technique and an account of the writers who have inspired him – London, Coleridge, Frost, Calvino, and others. From the home page, follow the “Writers on Writing” link.

“The winners are likely to be
adventurous writers prepared to take the greatest risks.
Much better to have aimed high and fallen short
than to have produced a spotless story
that offered you no challenges…”

Congratulations to Dorene O’Brien, Janey Runci,
Emma Darwin and the other winners
of the prestigious Bridport prize for 2004,
judged by Jim Crace.

To read his report on the competition, click here.

“I’ve been told Six is my woman’s book…
I’m telling women things that men under 40 don’t want them to know”

Jim Crace interviewed in Ink magazine

In the January 2004 issue of Ink, a magazine
for fiction, movies, sport, and other entertainments,
Jim Crace talks to Scott Anthony about mixed reviews,
Birmingham, and his plans for an adventurous retirement.

Unfortunately Ink is no longer available on the Web and has ceased publishing.

“When I’m with friends I never talk about books —
if someone raises the issue of my writing

I almost rudely snuff the subject out…
I don’t seem able to escape the Pilgrim Estate
where I was mostly brought up, where I was the grammar-school boy

who was too nervous to mention books.

All of these rational and irrational things are telling me,

‘Don’t talk about your novels to anybody.’ ”

Jim Crace opens up in The Art of Fiction
interview for The Paris Review

The fiftieth anniversary issue of The Paris Review
carries a long-awaited interview by Adam Begley,
Books Editor of The New York Observer,
with Jim Crace.

To read an extract from this interview,

click here.
This will take you to The Paris Review site.

I hope to bring you the full text of this absorbing interview
once I’ve checked any copyright issues.
But – with Paul Auster, new fiction,
reviews and poetry, and founding editor George Plimpton’s
look back over fifty years – it’s well worth buying.

Jim Crace on holidays (hellish and heavenly)

and the champions of 2003

“Customers who bought Six also bought Genesis…”

A difference of opinion between publishers
led to Jim Crace’s new novel being published under different titles
on different sides of the Atlantic.
To read more, click here

Jim Crace’s new book Six
(ISBN 0670881163)
was published by Viking
in hardcover on September 5,
price £16.99.

To order Six from amazon, click here.

July:

For details of Jim Crace’s upcoming appearances

please click here

The new novel by Jim Crace, Six, will be published in September.

I’ve had the privilege of reading the novel in proof and it is excellent.
The writing is quite concentrated, with strong dialogue and lots of Cracean observations
and ‘original proverbs’. The story is set in the
“once-famous ‘City of Kisses’, with its deep parks,
its balconies, and its prolific and disrupting river”,
a place at once fully specified, familiar and unsettling.
The main character, the actor Dern,
seems as hemmed in by the people he has brought to life
in countless plays and movies as he is by the children
he has unwittingly fathered,
whether or not he even meets them.
And the women he loves are very sharp, alive, and believable,
both in their passion for Dern and in their sometimes prickly individuality.

I will be posting selected reviews to the site when Six is published.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already sampled
the first chapter, of Six, follow the links below…

Moved to tears

To read Crace on Ian McEwan, click here

May 2003

An uncollected short story by Jim Crace

“I used to be wild once, for a year or two.
But I lost the habit, going after love.
I sometimes pick on those birds who can’t decide what they are,
wild or domestic…”

‘Helter Skelter, Hang Sorrow, Care’ll Kill A Cat’,

by Jim Crace,
was first published in 1975 in The New Review.
Click here to read it.

‘Helter Skelter…’ completes the web site’s project
of making Crace’s uncollected short fiction easily available.
For more of Crace’s writing outside his published books,
follow the links from Other Writings

April 2003

Jim Crace’s forthcoming novel
to be called Six in the UK
and Genesis in the US

The work is now with publishers Viking in the UK
and FSG in the US

“To be so fertile is a curse…”

In the novel a man recalls the settings and the details
of the conceptions of his seven children.
Six/Genesis will be published lather this year.

To read chapter 1, click here.

To see a preview of the cover, click here.

Congratulations

to Jakub Stemporowski,
recently awarded his Masters
by Nicolas Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland,
for his thesis on Jim Crace’s novel Arcadia.
Jakub draws on theories of culture and society to locate Arcadia
in the pastoral tradition,
as a post-modern fiction,
and as a novel of Birmingham.

To read ‘The City and the Country, the Myth and the Reality
in Jim Crace’s Novel Arcadia’, click here.

(It’s a substantial – 80 page – paper, so be prepared to wait while it opens.)

With thanks to Jakub Stemperowski.

Adam Begley makes a pilgrimage to Craceland

“We started to talk about specific novels — something he claims he just wouldn’t do
if it weren’t for journalists who ask him questions.
‘I’m not introspective about the things that I write,’ he said…
I remember asking him about how the death of his father, whom he loved,
could have inspired Being Dead, in which death descends with exceptional brutality.
Crace looked at me, a bit startled, and said
‘I wasn’t thinking about my father when I was writing,
I was dealing with the prose on the page.’ ”

This excellent review-cum-interview by Adam Begley
(Books editor of The New York Observer)
appeared in Southwest Review.
I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint the article here.

Southwest Review is one of the longest-running literary periodicals
in the United States and publishes fiction and poetry as well as essays.
You can sample the Review (and request a subscription) by clicking here.

“To be so fertile is a curse…”

In Jim Crace’s forthcoming novel Genesis
a man recalls the settings and the details
of the conceptions of his seven children.
Genesis will be published in 2003.

To read chapter 1 of the new work, click here.

Jim Crace awarded Doctorate
by the University of Birmingham

“For Jim Crace the writing of fiction is a decidedly moral business –
not in the crude sense of telling his readers how to live their lives
but in the more ambitious and more difficult task
of convincing them of their own richness as finite human beings
in a world deprived of transcendental consolation…”

To read the full text of the Oration by Professor Michael Butler, click here

“Modest, lovely and resourceful”, with a “versatile and winning cast”, the Flying Machine’s adaptation of Signals of Distress has been well-received

Scripted and directed by Joshua Carlebach, the play “re-imagines Crace’s chilling and hilarious vision of good intentions gone awry” when the survivors of a shipwreck are forced to take refuge with the inhabitants of a coastal town in nineteenth-century England.
A UK tour of this innovative production is under consideration…

To read the New York Times review click here

To find out more about Signals of Distress (the play):
click here

To find out more about Signals of Distress (the novel):
click here

“The trick is to place yourself in an imaginative and testing environment where unusual events are likely to occur and then to be responsive to any idea that offers itself”

Click here to read a new interview with Jim Crace.

On October 3 Jim Crace was onstage and ‘in discussion’
with Nick Hornby
in support of the proposed
National Academy of Writing (NAW).

To find out more about the NAW, which numbers Jim Crace,
Matthew Kneale, Doris Lessing, Philip Pullman,
and many other leading writers among its patrons, visit
http://www.writingacademy.org .

Click here for other appearances, readings, and workshops

Philip Tew, author of a critical study of English novelist
B.S. Johnson, is preparing a book-length study
of Jim Crace’s works

Dr Tew has confirmed that he is in discussion with Manchester University Press
about this project. I hope to have more information soon.

Jim Crace: summer reading

At this time of year the papers are full of summer reading lists compiled by the good and the great. Jim Crace is looking forward to a mixture of “duty and pleasure: I’ll be rereading all of Nick Hornby’s books as we’re on stage and ‘in conversation’ in October in support of the proposed National Academy of Writing in Birmingham. His novels have all the tenderness and plot confidence that mine lack. Otherwise I’m looking forward to new novels by writers I’ve encountered and enjoyed before: Birmingham’s Alan Mahar (After The Man Before, Methuen) and New Zealand’s Damien Wilkins (Chemistry, published in September by Granta). I’ll also be indulging a personal fantasy with Matt Rendell’s Kings of the Mountain (Aurum Press), the story of how Colombia’s cycling heroes changed their nation’s history.” For other lists and recommendations see The Guardian, 29 June.

Click here to take part in the new site survey…

Revealed: the real Mondazy?
Jim Crace kicks off a ‘baton story’ to raise money
for writers’ scholarships

Jim Crace has contributed the first chapter of a ‘baton story’ (that is, a story in which different authors write successive chapters, ‘passing the baton’ to one another) called “The Moving Finger” and featuring a certain Felix Mondazy, novelist, playwright, poet, and translator. Is this the Mondazy of Being Dead and The Devil’s Larder? The story was published online at www.hayfestival.co.uk. It will soon come out in print, with profits going to fund writers’ bursaries at next year’s Hay-on-Wye Festival.

To coincide with Jim Crace’s tour of Hungary,
a paper by Karoly Rozsa of the University of Debrecen.

In May Jim Crace took part in a conference on British Literary Studies in Budapest and lectured at the University of Debrecen. In June the prize-winning Hungarian publishers Ulpius-Ház will issue Being Dead. As far as I know this is Crace’s first book publication in Hungary. According to András Kepets, director of Ulpius-Ház, “Jim Crace is not yet well-known in Hungary…we want to give him the place he deserves.”
An edition of Quarantine will follow.

Karoly Rozsa, a graduate of the University of Debrecen in English and Hungarian linguistics, has kindly allowed this site to publish his perceptive reading of Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stones. Rozsa’s close reading of the text of the novel identifies patterns of imagery associated with the stonemasons’ village and the heath beyond and suggests that ‘what is indispensable for the birth of storytelling is the clash between two antagonistic forces (two opposing worlds)…the subject who suffers the outcome…and who is sensitive enough to realise its significance, that is the storyteller.’

To read Karoly Rozsa’s paper ‘The Gift of Stories’ click here.

To view this site’s page for The Gift of Stones click here.

Click here to read ‘Refugees’, a Crace story from 1977

and find out what John Fowles and Terry Eagleton had to say about Crace’s work

I’m pleased to be able to ‘re-issue’ this early, uncollected story of Africa to visitors to the site.

Though supportive of what he called “a great festival”, Jim Crace nevertheless decided to withdraw from Hay
in protest over Nestlé sponsorship of the event

Citing their concern over Nestlé’s marketing of powdered baby milk in the Third World,
Jim Crace and Germaine Greer this week announced
that they were cancelling their appearances at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival,
which has accepted sponsorship from Nestlé.

Crace, who was to appear on Saturday June 1, said that
Nestlé’s failure to observe the World Health Organisation’s code on

“so-called breast substitute milk has been ignored for a long time...It’s a great shame.

The festival has a wonderful programme and I would hate to see it damaged by this.

But the organisers must have known Nestlé has been the subject of a boycott

for a long time and that the creative community would be likely to feel uneasy

about this association. They have only got themselves to blame.”

For a list of Jim Crace’s upcoming appearances, click here

To coincide with Jim Crace’s tour of Hungary,
a paper by Karoly Rozsa of the University of Debrecen.

In May Jim Crace took part in a conference on British Literary Studies in Budapest and lectured at the University of Debrecen. In June the prize-winning Hungarian publishers Ulpius-Ház will issue Being Dead. As far as I know this is Crace’s first book publication in Hungary. According to András Kepets, director of Ulpius-Ház, “Jim Crace is not yet well-known in Hungary…we want to give him the place he deserves.”
An edition of Quarantine will follow.

Karoly Rozsa, a graduate of the University of Debrecen in English and Hungarian linguistics, has kindly allowed this site to publish his perceptive reading of Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stones. Rozsa’s close reading of the text of the novel identifies patterns of imagery associated with the stonemasons’ village and the heath beyond and suggests that ‘what is indispensable for the birth of storytelling is the clash between two antagonistic forces (two opposing worlds)…the subject who suffers the outcome…and who is sensitive enough to realise its significance, that is the storyteller.’

To read Karoly Rozsa’s paper ‘The Gift of Stories’ click here.

To view this site’s page for The Gift of Stones click here.

Jim Crace in Oz

“I imagined writing a didactic political fiction
that would change the hearts and minds of men and women,
but I didn't know what the next sentence was.
When I discovered the magical realism I would write,
I immediately could tell you what the next three books were.”

To read an interview with Michelle Griffin of the Melbourne Age, conducted during Jim Crace’s recent tour of Australia, click here.

The structure and craft of Being Dead

Kate Mayfield, who is completing her MFA in Creative Writing
at the University of Arizona,
has mapped the “fluid plot structure” of Being Dead
in a chart which shows “how certain themes,
especially sex and death, interact throughout”.
To see her chart click here.

There is a discussion devoted to Being Dead at ConstantReader.
To take part, follow the link to the ConstantReader homepage,
go to the WebBoard, where you will need to register,
and then to the Reading List. Here you will find a choice of titles, and plenty of discerning readers.

http://www.constantreader.com/

BookMuse.com is also well worth a visit.
Although targeted at book discussion groups, with features such as
‘Leaders tips’ and ‘Topics for Discussion’,
the site is a great resource for lone readers too!
Click here for the extended response to Jim Crace’s
National Book Critics’ Circle award-winning novel

If you can’t make it to one of Jim Crace’s appearances, you can still hear and see
the author discuss The Devil’s Larder via a ‘Bookwrap’.
Bookwraps are a new Web-based promotional tool coming soon to sites like Amazon and on-line library catalogues. This one is brought to you courtesy of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Jim Crace’s US publisher (and therefore relates to the American edition of the book).
It is based on an interview prepared by Charles Halpin.
To view the Bookwrap for The Devil’s Larder click here.

‘A book that changed me’

Jim Crace has several times (most recently at Readerville.com) referred to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel In Evil Hour as a book that changed him and helped him to find his own voice. Visitors may now read what Crace wrote in his original review of the novel by clicking here.

December 2001:

Click here to read ‘Refugees’, a Crace story from 1977

and find out what John Fowles and Terry Eagleton had to say about Crace’s work

I’m pleased to be able to ‘re-issue’ this early, uncollected story of Africa to visitors to the site.

Jim Crace on the unwritten legacy of activist Alice Howells,
who died in September this year

and on The Talmud and the Internet, his choice for Book of the Year

Click here to read these and other occasional pieces on a range of personal and literary subjects.

Jim Crace discusses his working methods, ‘honesty’ in fiction,
the difference between English and American readers and editors, and many other topics with friends from Readerville.com

To read the discussion, click here

November 2001:

The North American reception of The Devil’s Larder has been extremely positive.

In Toronto, where Crace recently appeared
at the Harbourfront International Festival,
the critics had this to say about The Devil’s Larder:

James Grainger, Toronto Star (Oct 21, 2001): "Fit for a king…Crace…has an almost uncanny ability to nail down a dramatic situation, and the characters to enact it, in one or two sentences…
one of the best writers around."

Kevin Connolly, Eye (18 Oct 2001): "the tone moves from the morbid to the tender, the dark to the whimsical…it reads like a classic." This article contains extracts from a new interview with Crace in which he discusses his "European" ambitions in writing The Devil’s Larder, his commitment to "traditional" story-telling as opposed to the "very recent" idea of realism, and why he "would not be seen dead" reading the UK edition of The Devil’s Larder, with its "sexy" cover, in public. Well worth reading: click here.

My thanks to E.P. Hewitt for forwarding these reviews.

October 2001:

The Devil’s Larder published in the US

"Crace is a a great writer of whimsical, fastidious, poetic prose," says Adam Phillips in The New York Times. "Even by Crace’s standards, The Devil's Larder is an extraordinary book…"
To read the review, click here (you may need to register)

 "Jim Crace is one of the best novelists in Britain," says Brooke Allan in The Atlantic. "His work doesn’t clamor for attention, nor does it draw one in with conventional, reader-friendly narratives…On the contrary, its muted rhythms require a certain engagement from the reader, a willingness to read more slowly, to listen harder. Those who do so will be rewarded with fiction that is thoughtful, harmonic, and original. Crace never squanders a word or an image." To read the review, click here.

"Crace’s fictions rise up and unfold in a beautiful, unhurried way, like the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales," writes Richard Wallace in The Seattle Times. To read the review, click here.

Interview on ABC Tales

"A medium British seaport, turned on its side and relocated on the Med,
but peopled by a bunch of citizens whose dominant gene is mischievous…"
is the description Andrew Pack elicits from Jim Crace
of the setting of his stories in an excellent interview on ABC Tales.
The interview is especially good for what it reveals about Jim Crace’s working methods
and contains some advice to aspiring authors.

To read it click here.

September 2001:

Critical acclaim for The Devil’s Larder.

 Some highlights from the reception of Jim Crace’s new book:

"In his novel Quarantine, Crace explored the temptation of Christ in the desert and the effects of starvation on the mind, body and spirit. Though The Devil’s Larder is not a sequel, the two books are different sides of the same coin. To fast is to remove oneself from the daily rhythms of food preparation and consumption. To feast is to heighten those rhythms, and raise them to glory." To read Helen Dunmore’s review in The Times (1 September) click here.

 "Perched intimately alongside sex and death, Crace celebrates the imaginative sustenance of unknown ingredients." To read David Vincent’s review of The Devil’s Larder in The Observer (2 September) click here.

"Crace is a writer of ‘exactitude’ – Italo Calvino’s term – in that he evokes big themes by concentrating on the minute definition of empirical detail," writes Christopher Tayler in The Times Literary Supplement ("Perfect Monday soup", September 7, p. 8). After a discussion of The Devil’s Larder in the context of the sources and style of Crace’s fiction thus far, Tayler concludes that the new book is "more entertaining and in some ways more adventurous" than previous works.
This article is well worth reading – unfortunately I’m not able to offer a link to it until it is archived on the TLS site in approximately six months’ time.

"I write books about questions to which I want answers," Crace says. "So with Being Dead there is a narrative of comfort about death which will serve atheists as well as Christians. With The Devil’s Larder, recognising how central food was to my imagination, to our culture and sense of self, I wanted to find out what I would discover about the place of food in our lives."
To read Dominic Bradbury’s interview with Jim Crace in The Times (September 5), click here.

Will The Pest House be Jim Crace’s last book?

"I’m eager for adventures of a different kind…" he tells Ong Sor Fern,
Books Editor of the Singapore Straits Times.
To read the text of this interview,
find out about the genesis of The Devil’s Larder
and what Jim Crace feels about cyberspace,
please click here.

August 2001:

"There are no bitter fruits in Heaven nor is there honey in the Devil’s larder."

Visitations IV.3

Jim Crace’s new book The Devil’s Larder
(ISBN 0670881457)
is published by Viking
in hardcover on September 6,
price £12.99.

In an interview with Robert Birnbaum conducted last year, Jim Crace described The Devil’s Larder:

"The quotation that introduces it—and I invent everything including the epigrams—is from that non-existent famous book of the Bible, Visitations, Chapter IV, verse 3, ‘There are no bitter fruits in Heaven nor is there honey in the Devil's larder.’ This book goes into the Devil’s larder and takes the different foods that are in the larder and makes fictions out of them. In the same way that Calvino makes fictions out of different towns in Invisible Cities or Primo Levi makes fictions of all the items in the periodic table from his book Periodic Table. So they are a hundred short fictions about food. Not about cooking, not about eating and not about restaurants and not about taste. It’s the last taboo subject that not enough people deal with in literature. Food is a subject so central to our sense of selves: our mortality, the shapes of our bodies, our intimate relationship with our own insides. Sexuality, all of those things...this thing is a cumulative book about food and it’s very playful and it’s a lot of fun and it’s very dark also. I have to admit it’s dark, I can’t stop my books being dark."

To read the full text of this excellent, engrossing and revealing interview, click here.

To read extracts from The Devil’s Larder, click here.

To order a copy from amazon.co.uk, click here.

July 2001:

A new adaptation by New York’s Flying Machine of Signals of Distress

From September 27-30, 2001, The Flying Machine, an acclaimed theatre ensemble, will present their adaptation of Jim Crace’s Signals Of Distress at Soho Rep. in New York City.

The following Press Release (21 July 2001) gives some details and I will keep you posted on this latest foray into theatre for Crace’s work.

Announcing an upcoming production of an adaptation of Jim Crace’s SIGNALS OF DISTRESS...

From September 27-30, 2001, internationally acclaimed ensemble The Flying Machine (http://www.theflyingmachine.org) will present their adaptation of Jim Crace’s SIGNALS OF DISTRESS at Soho Rep. in New York City. This workshop premiere will be followed by a world tour then back to New York for an extended run.

The Flying Machine is a highly acclaimed international collaboration formed in Paris in 1996 by a group of street performers from various theatrical backgrounds and expertise. They are currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Using a global array of theatrical styles, they create works from original and adapted narratives while expanding theatrical possibilities. While The Flying Machine's primary tools are the body, manipulated objects, mask-play and music, they draw on their Lecoq training and utilize their knowledge of Khatakali, Decroux, and other contemporary dance forms to train and to inform their work. Each member of The Flying Machine functions not only as performer but as musician, puppeteer, mask maker, writer and director. They believe in true collaboration and celebrate the individual’s voice within an ensemble setting.

The Flying Machine’s work has been performed in the United States and abroad, downtown and uptown, from Soho Rep. and The Present Company to Carnegie Hall. They have been called "visionary...unflaggingly inventive" by the Village Voice as well as "an amazingly talented group of players unseen in modern times...the real thing" (Time Out, NY). The company has been praised for creating work that is "...simple, stoic and carefully orchestrated...a lesson in honesty that will hopefully be heeded" (Las Ultimas Noticias). The Zurich Zeitung comments, "Rarely do you see something so profoundly deep in New York's disposable theater world." The company's past works include Sad Since Tuesday (1997), Utopians (1998),The Escapist (1999), Archipelago (2000), Stravinsky's Petrushka with the New York Youth Symphony Orchestra (2000), and the upcoming Signals of Distress, from the novel by Jim Crace (2001).

Crace’s work has appeared on stage before: click here for information about the Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s adaptation of Quarantine.

June 2001:

Portuguese journalist José Prata has kindly sent this web site the text of his interview with Jim Crace for Livros magazine. Portuguese speakers may read the article here.

Many readers have asked about the references in Being Dead to "Mondazy’s Fish". In the Livros article Crace confirms what many of you have suspected – that Mondazy’s Fish is his invention, intended to contribute to the realist texture of a work that is "fiction from beginning to end… The non-existent insect life, the imaginary zoological phenomena, and the fictitious citations from imagined books" all give depth to the world of Being Dead.

May 2001:

The New Yorker serves up a mouth-watering appetiser

The May 7 issue of The New Yorker magazine featured six stories
from Jim Crace’s forthcoming ‘cumulative novel’, The Devil’s Larder.
Selections from the book have already appeared
in print in The Slow Digestions of the Night, a small-format paperback from Penguin,
and on this web site (click here for a taste).
The extracts in The New Yorker are titled, rather than simply numbered:

"Mussels on the House"

"George’s Magic Cookies"

"Monday’s Soup"

"Wild Fungi"

"Ashes and Spice"

"Boysie Tart"

The book will be published in the UK in the autumn. Let the feast begin!

My thanks to Jim Morrison for this information.

*

The Japanese edition of Being Dead
is published on June 10 by Hakusui-sha, Tokyo.
In a postscript, the translator, Sachie Watanabe,
makes kind mention of this web site.
Sachie Watanabe’s other translation credits include
Will Self’s Cock and Bull and Irvine Welsh’s Filth.
A translation of Quarantine is in preparation.

My thanks to Miyahara Kazunari, whose paper on Quarantine appears here,
for this information.

April 2001:

"Buddhism seems to possess some agreeable qualities for Crace":

A new and thought-provoking contribution
to the discussion of Quarantine
from Miyahara Kazunari, Yamaguchi University

Click here to read it

March 2001:

Click here for extracts from Jim Crace’s
new work, The Devil’s Larder

and for an exclusive preview of the luscious cover artwork…

Being Dead wins the American NBCC award

Click here for Jim Crace’s speech to the NBCC

 Click here for cities/dates of Crace’s upcoming North American tour

February 2001:

More accolades for Being Dead
American readers and critics continue to heap praise on Crace’s 1999 novel. This month, Being Dead was nominated for the prestigious National Book Critics’ Circle Award and listed as a Notable Book by the American Library Association. For the NBCC’s final decision, please check back here in March.

‘Public culture and the postmodern city’:
click here for an essay on Arcadia by Dr Doris Teske

January 2001:

Jim Crace’s ‘Narratives of Comfort’

Click here for an essay by Michael Farren

December 2000:

Being Dead chosen as Book of the Year
by the New York Times

Click here to read the editors’ comments

The Devil’s Larder manuscript now with the publisher

Click here to find out more about Jim Crace’s forthcoming works

Reluctant storyteller:

Jim Crace interviewed in The Guardian. Click here

For the most recent updates to this site, please go to the Home page.

This site is organised into the following main sections:

Chronology: a brief biographical and literary chronology.

Books: a discussion of Jim Crace's novels,
with extensive links and pointers to reviews and commentary about them.
This is the main section of the site. I invite ideas and contributions
from anyone with an interest in Crace's work.

Other writings: a list (and some e-texts) of other writing by Crace,
including his first published stories, plays, journalism, reviews and opinions.

Forthcoming: a list of forthcoming publications, appearances, etc.

Context: links and pointers to information and discussion about
themes present in Crace's work, including exclusive interviews with Jim Crace.

Feedback: where you tell me about yourself and how to improve the site.

I would like to hear from anyone with ideas for content and links.
Please email me, Andrew Hewitt, at aghewitt@yahoo.com.

Note on copyright:

Original material on this web site is © Andrew Hewitt 2000-2012
and is available for literary non-commercial uses only.
Repurposed material is copyright as shown.
Please feel free to contact me if you want to reproduce any material
from this web site, I will try and help arrange permission if you require it.

aghewitt@yahoo.com

Jim Crace's books are available from Blackwell's Online Bookshop
who have agreed to list this site on their page of author links.