ABSTRACT
Jim Crace has been an unclassifiable but powerful presence in contemporary fiction since the publication of his first book in 1986. Crace retains an ability to surprise his readers and he possesses one of the most distinctive and carefully crafted prose styles of any novelist of the last twenty years. Although his first book did not appear until 1986, Crace began writing fiction in the mid-1970s and several of his short stories and radio plays won awards and critical attention in the years before his work appeared between hard covers. Crace uses his novel to play with conflicting ideas of what a city and its relationship to the countryside that surrounds it should be. As in so much of Crace's fiction, different worlds collide and the 'signals' sent between them are lost in the sending. Crace's two most powerful novels so far are Quarantine and Being Dead.
