Harvest

Jim Crace Press Reviews

'Unfolding in Crace's trademark rhythmic prose and brimming with unsentimental but intense feeling for the natural landscape, this lingering novel is as resonant as it is elusive.'
Daily Mail

'Jim Crace is the most generous of writers. A fabulist, an open heart, an imagination in full flight. There is something of a harvest in every book: the promise, the violence, the fall, the regain. And Harvest is one of his best novels ever. He is, quite simply, one of the great writers of our time.'
Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

'Harvest, his latest novel, dramatises one of the great under-told narratives of English history ... Crace brings his signature combination of atmosphere and exactitude to every aspect of this far-off world ... the prose is extraordinary: rich yet measured, estranged and familiar, both intimate and austere ... Harvest can be read in mythical, even biblical terms, but the physical and emotional displacement of individuals and communities at its heart remains as politically resonant today as it was at the time.'
Guardian

'Crace's prose - percussive, rhythmic, resonant - is unmistakable.'
Independent on Sunday

'The rhythmic power of his prose, with its vivid physical imagery, brings his stories to life ... Crace is brilliant at evoking atmosphere, mood and an all-persuasive sense of place ... Harvest has been announced by Crace as his final novel. If so ... it is majestic leavetaking, honed by an unforgettable narrative voice: resigned, bewildered, ultimately hopeful ... Few novels as fine or as complex in their apparent simplicity will be published this, or indeed any, year.'
Irish Times

'Harvest is Jim Crace's most ambitious novel since Being Dead (1999) ... Crace's stunning depiction of country life in all its hardship - less Tolstoy, more Hardy, but bleak-pastoral rather than idyllic-bucolic ... Harvest is a mesmerising slow-burner of a novel, both a paean to a lost way of life and a timeless cautionary fable... We gladly accompany Thirsk on his eventful seven-day journey of discovery, always aware of that one portentous word which slyly reappears as a leitmotif, signifying a better future beyond the village boundary, a word in which Jim Crace cleverly compounds his perennial twin concerns of place and time: hereafter.'
Literary Review

'The best of his that I've read ... Full of the most wonderful descriptions ... Very readable and very scary ... A tour de force'
Gillian Slovo, Saturday Review on BBC Radio 4

'Crace evoked this musty, murky world, and the ambiguous persona of our protagonist within it, with wit and immediacy that bring it touchably close ... The story that he constructs is involving and mysterious, stoked by vividly descriptive prose that's never wastefully or showily verbose.'
Scotland on Sunday