Jim Crace: Harvest

harvest

The latest addition to my website is Jim Crace‘s Harvest. Crace has said that this is his final novel. It is an excellent novel, telling the story of an unnamed (not only by the author but by the characters) village somewhere in England, at the time of the enclosure of the common land. At the start of the story the villagers get on with their daily life, unchanged for many years. However, the arrival of three travellers, the burning of the barn and the discovery that the man they thought was the owner is not, in fact, the real owner, leads to major upheaval in the life of everyone in the village, with witchcraft, murder and brutality the order of the day. Crace does a superb job of evoking the English landscape and village of the period and also tells an excellent storey.

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