The Pesthouse

Overview

With spectacular originality and the ability to move readers effortlessly into the world of his imagination, Crace 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.

Editorial Reviews

In this postapocalyptic picaresque from Whitbread-winner Crace (for Quarantine), America has regressed to medieval conditions. After a forgotten eco-reaction in the distant past, the U.S. government, economy and society have collapsed. The illiterate inhabitants ride horses, fight with bows and swords and scratch a meager living from farming and fishing. But with crop yields and fish runs mysteriously dwindling, most are trekking to the Atlantic coast to take ships to the promised land of Europe, gawking along the way at the ruins of freeways and machinery yards, which seem the wasteful excesses of giants. Heading east, naive farm boy Franklin teams up with Margaret, a recovering victim of the mysterious "flux" whose shaven head (mark of the unclean) causes passersby to shun her. Their love blossoms amid misadventures in an anarchic landscape: Franklin is abducted by slave-traders; Margaret falls in with a religious sect that bans metal and deplores manual labor, symbolically repudiating America's traditional cult of progress, technology and industriousness (masculinity takes some hits, too). Crace's ninth novel leaves the U.S. impoverished, backward, fearful and abandoned by history. Less crushing than Cormac McCarthy's The Road and less over-the-top than Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown (to name two recent postapocalyptos), Crace's fable is an engrossing, if not completely convincing, outline of the shape of things to come. (May) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Jim Crace

March 1, 1946: Jim Crace born at Brocket Hall, near Welwyn in Hertfordshire, UK. Raised in Enfield, North London. 1965-8: studies at the Birmingham College of Commerce as an external student of London University. College contemporaries include the novelists Gordon Burn and Patrick McGrath, and the Iranian photographer, Abbas, currently President of Magnum. Graduates with a BA Hons in English Literature. 2001: Being Dead wins the National Book Critics Circle award (USA). Crace publishes The Devil's Larder, a cumulative novel on the theme of food. 2003: publishes Six, about the actor and (unwitting) father Felix Dern, a man cursed by fertility. 200- : Crace s next book has the working title The Pest House

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Additional Info

Imprint

Nan A. Talese

Filesize

741.19 KB

Number of Pages

272

eBook ISBN

9780307455581