The Gift of Stones - Softcover

Jim Crace is the author of eight previous novels. Being Dead was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Award, the E.M. Foster Award, and the Guardian Award. He lives in Birmingham, England with his wife and two children.

If Crace's name is not yet familiar to American readers, it soon should be. This 42-year-old Englishman's second work continues in the imaginative and almost poetic vein of his Continent ( LJ 3/1/87). Once again he creates a world, in this case a Stone Age village, seemingly distant from our own and yet so like it as to be almost frightening. It is a world confronting change brought on by the advent of bronze, a technological development not unlike the coming of the computer. The villagers, once secure and flourishing, suddenly find their craft--and themselves--obsolete. As the fabulist tale unwinds, Crace looks into the role of the artist in society--here, a storyteller--considering both the impact and limits of imagination in guiding us toward new horizons. A marvelous literary effort; highly recommended.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
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