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“... I used once​ to have a calligrapher’s booth in the marketplace. Bridegrooms came and I blessed their marriage certificates with the name of God in gold-leaf. I provided decorative alphabets for elementary schools and delicate pillow-prayers on silk for the superstitious. The old came to my booth and detailed their sins and their virtues. I inscribed them into a list on parchment soaked in ambergris and sealed them into a tube of bamboo ...”

“... Jim Crace is as much ‘out-of-pattern’ as the narrator of his new novel, a settled outsider. He can hardly even be said to resist the pull of publishing convention, any more than aluminium resists a magnet. He’s attracted to unlabelled, marginal or parenthetical times and places, environments that might seem unpromising as settings for fiction, even actively hostile to the growth of narrative ...”

“... to have produced their successors. Before the publication of his first book, Continent, in 1986, Jim Crace worked as a freelance features journalist for the Sunday Telegraph. He’d written a few short stories, some radio plays, and had won the Socialist Challenge short story competition (judged by challenging socialist Terry Eagleton). A ...”

“... Alfred Busi​ , the protagonist of Jim Crace’s new novel, is a songwriter with an enchanting and consoling voice, so celebrated in his home city that, when the book opens, he is about to be immortalised in bronze on its Avenue of Fame. This city, the narrator tartly informs us, is too fond of awarding medals: It was the lazy habit of the town and had been for several hundred years to hand out these decorations – to men, that is – for anything achieved, no matter how minor or mean – for the completion of a building project, say, or for life-long service with a restaurant, or a golden wedding anniversary ...”

“... In Jim Crace’s most celebrated novel, Quarantine, seven strangers spend a month together – or if not exactly together, then in close proximity to one another – in the Judaean desert. Four of them have come to spend forty days in fasting and contemplation in the hope of a miracle: an old stonemason from Jerusalem, dying of cancer; a woman who thinks she is unable to conceive, just like her husband’s previous wife; a young man looking for something he can’t quite name, something more than a meeting with God, something beyond enlightenment; a ‘badu’, a wild man from the deserts to the south, who the others think is mad but turns out instead to be deaf ...”

“... and luck need to go along with talent. A name which appeared first in Introduction 6 is that of Jim Crace. Heinemann have now published his first novel, Continent, which comes with some impressive credentials. Its author has had Arts Council grants; sections of Continent have appeared in the New Review, the London Magazine, Quarto and Encounter as well ...”

“... but that’s not the same thing as the best novels, and I would read The Devil’s Larder by Jim Crace before Rushdie’s Fury (they’ll both be published on the same day). In 1980, Bill Buford, then the magazine’s editor (he’s now fiction editor of the New Yorker), wrote a piece for Granta – included in Granta: The First 21 Years ...”

“... through patterns of imagery.’ ‘God help us,’ said Gunning-Forbes loudly. Reading Jim Crace’s Quarantine, I was powerfully reminded of Froulish’s projected stuck-in-a-lift novel. A lugubriously entertaining secondary character in John Wain’s wonderful picaresque fiction, Hurry on Down (1953), Froulish went on to present his restive ...”

“... contain the Sayles menace, the RAF drops emergency supplies of the good stuff: And so it was that Jim Crace fell from the sky. Alison Moore and Henry Sutton and Hilary Mantel fell from the sky, Ali Smith and Marcus Mills too. Their books fell from the sky in their thousands, parachuted into parks and on to roundabouts in towns and cities across the ...”

“... Lord of the Flies and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; other parallels would include The Pesthouse by Jim Crace, not to mention George Miller’s series of Mad Max movies. I was also reminded of L’uomo verticale by Davide Longo (2010, published in English in 2012 as The Last Man Standing, though ‘The Upright Man’ might have been a better title). One of ...”

“... Colum McCann has described Jim Crace as ‘quite simply, one of the great writers of our time’, Aleksandar Hemon as ‘quite frankly, the greatest writer of our generation’, and Nathan Englander as ‘quite simply, one of the very best we have’. He has called Emma Donoghue ‘one of the great literary ventriloquists’ and John Boyne ‘one of the great craftsmen in contemporary literature ...”

“... a nation, of living without a sense of history’. McEwan shares with his fellow English novelist Jim Crace not only an interest in history but in finding a style in prose that is slow-moving, yet compelling, at times stilted and dry, and then suddenly sharp and precise. His couple on their wedding night in On Chesil Beach have their past lives and their ...”

“... irritated by it. And then one or two things happened: a very good story came in from a guy called Jim Crace. He was just an unknown chap who came from Birmingham or somewhere. Another story came in unsolicited from someone called Ian McEwan. There did seem to be these gifted people out there, so we were up and running. People I knew about, like you and ...”