Only the crazy make it 
Thomas Jones
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. Two of the seven are there not by choice: a merchant who was abandoned by the rest of his caravan after falling ill, and his pregnant wife. The last of them is ‘a traveller called Jesus, from the cooler, farming valleys in the north, a Galilean’.
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Whisky and Soda Man · J.G. Ballard
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Welly-Whanging · Alan Hollinghurst
Diary · The Last Days of eBay
Mr Down-by-the-Levee · Updike’s Terrorist
Diary · My Life as a Geek
Rut after Rut after Rut · Denis Johnson’s Vietnam
This Is Not That Place · David Eggers escapes from Sudan
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