LoveReading Says
This is Jim Crace at his most accessible. With this carefully drawn novel, set in a post-apocalyptic America, Crace takes the reader through the most desperate of circumstances, seemingly humdrum from afar, which, in fact, are the essential elements of existence: shelter, food and companionship. As the tale unfolds, the predicament in which the main protagonists find themselves, initially scarcely credible (could this happen to America?), the author depicts the breakdown so skilfully as to draw resounding parallels with the present day.
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The Pesthouse Synopsis
This used to be America, this river crossing in the ten-month stretch of land, this sea-to-sea. It used to be the safest place on earth.
America as we know it has fragmented. Its machines have stopped, its communities have splintered, its history is virtually forgotten, and the great migration has started: eastwards, through the mountains and down the perilous Dreaming Highway, to ships rumoured to sail to a land of greater promise. Into this landscape stumbles Franklin, who has left his home only to find new ties in a pesthouse perched above a valley. Margaret, suffering the early stages of plague, has been carried up from Ferrytown to recuperate or die alone. When her village is destroyed, she and Franklin set out together, compelled to leave everything they love behind them.
The Pesthouse is realized with the flair, conviction and intensity for which Crace is admired all over the world. It imagines an America adapting to a future without technology, without science, without social cohesion; and it tells of how two people find strength in one another when the world as they know it is falling apart.
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About Jim Crace
Novelist Jim Crace has won numerous prizes for his writing including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
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