Harvest (Crace)

Harvest 
Jim Crace, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307278975


Summary
Shortlisted, 2012 Man Booker Prize

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 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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 1, 1946
• Where—St. Albans, Hertfordshire, UK
• Education—B.A., Birminghham City University
• Awards—2 Whitbread Awards; National Book
   Award (US)
• Currently—lives in Birmingham, England


James "Jim" Crace (born ) is a contemporary English writer who has won a number of awards. He currently lives in the Moseley area of Birmingham with his wife. They have two children, Thomas Charles Crace (born 1981) and the actress Lauren Rose Crace, who played Danielle Jones in EastEnders.

Biography
Crace was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and grew up with his siblings in Forty Hill, an area at the far northern point of Greater London, close to Enfield, where Crace attended Enfield Grammar School. He studied for a degree at the Birmingham College of Commerce (now part of Birmingham City University), where he was enrolled as an external student of the University of London.

After securing a BA (Hons) in English Literature in 1968, he travelled overseas with the UK organization Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), working in Sudan. Two years later he returned to the UK, and worked with the BBC, writing educational programmes. From 1976 to 1987 he worked as a freelance journalist, before giving up due to the excessive "political interference" he experienced at newspapers such as The Sunday Times.

In 1974 he published his first work of prose fiction, Annie, California Plates in The New Review, and in the next 10 years would write a number of short stories and radio plays.

In 1986 Crace published Continent, which won the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction, and the Guardian Fiction prize. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999 and has had  two books shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, including his 11th and most recent, Harvest.  (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/14/13.)

Book Reviews
Glorious.... Crace writes with a particular, haunting empathy for the displaced.... His plots may be epic, but his sentences carry a sensual charge.... 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.
Rob Nixon - New York Times Book Review


[Harvest] is intellectually and morally engaging while also being exciting to read.... Mr. Crace's imagery brilliantly suggests the loamy, lyric glories of rustic English language and life.... [he] devotes his considerable talents to telling an affecting tale of a bound world and its simple people as they head toward a tragic and inexorable breakdown.
Wall Street Journal


Harvest is as finely written as it is tautly structured. Pungently flavoured with archaic words, its language is exhilaratingly exact, sometimes poetic and sometimes stark. Magnificently resurrecting a pivotal moment in our history about which it is deeply knowledgeable, this simultaneously elegiac and unillusioned novel is an achievement worthy to stand alongside those of Crace’s great fictional ­influence, William Golding.
Sunday Times (London)


Crace, an original and a literary stylist, with, usually, something remarkable to say, says it here in a haunting work of sudden violence and vengeance ... Few novels as fine or as complex in their apparent simplicity will be published this, or indeed any, year.
Irish Times


As with Crace's other novels, Harvest is deftly written, in language — formal, slightly archaic even — that reflects the setting it describes. It's also tightly plotted ... Crace's real concern is his characters, the way that, like all of us, they make mistakes and act from weakness, and turn on one another when things go wrong.
Los Angeles Times


(Starred review.) [Harvest] is intellectually and morally engaging while also being exciting to read ... Mr. Crace's imagery brilliantly suggests the loamy, lyric glories of rustic English language and life ... [he] devotes his considerable talents to telling an affecting tale of a bound world and its simple people as they head toward a tragic and inexorable breakdown.
Publishers Weekly


[W]ith the hard work of planting and harvesting as backdrop, we see the villagers move inexorably toward a tragedy they've provoked. One morning, Master Kent's stable is found burning, and strangers who have peaceably signaled their presence by sending up the customary smoke plume are blamed.... Verdict: A quietly breathtaking work revealing how fate plays with us as we play with fate; highly recommended.  —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


The order and calm of a preindustrial village in England is upset by a mysterious fire and the simultaneous appearance of three strangers. The insular community strikes out against the newcomers but turns on itself in a fit, literally, of witch hunting....  This is a spare, disquieting, unique, and ultimately haunting and memorable little novel. Its limited accessibility may restrict its audience, but followers of literary fiction will be reading and talking about it. —Mark Levine
Booklist


(Starred review.) Rarely does language so plainspoken and elemental tell a story so richly open to interpretation on so many different levels. Is this a religious allegory? An apocalyptic fable? A mystery? A meditation on the human condition? With economy and grace.... Crace continues to occupy a singular place in contemporary literature.
Kirkus Reviews

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