Harvest
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3.6 • 9 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2013
As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders - two men and a dangerously magnetic woman - arrives on the woodland borders and puts up a make-shift camp. That same night, the local manor house is set on fire. Over the course of seven days, Walter Thirsk sees his hamlet unmade: the harvest blackened by smoke and fear, the new arrivals cruelly punished, and his neighbours held captive on suspicion of witchcraft. But something even darker is at the heart of his story, and he will be the only man left to tell it... Told in Jim Crace's hypnotic prose, Harvest evokes the tragedy of land pillaged and communities scattered, as England's fields are irrevocably enclosed. Timeless yet singular, mythical yet deeply personal, this beautiful novel of one man and his unnamed village speaks for a way of life lost for ever.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Harvest is the story of an isolated agrarian village where outsiders are received with violent suspicion. British novelist Jim Crace’s mesmerising novel is narrated by Walter Thirsk, a one-time manservant who joined the community through marriage and maintains a degree of distance from his course, superstitious neighbours. Sharp, reliable, and uncommonly introspective, Thirsk is perfectly positioned to observe the big changes encroaching on the village. Crace expertly orchestrates the atmosphere of menace, proving once again his formidable talent for crafting allegorical tales about the heavy social and psychological tolls of modernity and globalisation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his previous 10 novels, the versatile Crace has been heralded for his firmly rooted, painstakingly detailed impressions of time and place, and his latest work is no exception. In fact, the setting an isolated English farming village, in an unspecified past, with its "planched and thicketed" inhabitants is so imaginatively described that it stands as the book's richest character. Over the course of seven days following the harvest, the hamlet is alight with sudden change. A mysterious fire has set Master Kent's manor stables and dovecote ablaze. Three newcomers two men and an ominously alluring woman who arrived that same night are hastily blamed for the fire. All three have their heads shaved as punishment, and the men are shackled for a week to a pillory. When one of them dies and the master's favorite horse is later found bludgeoned to death, accusations of witchcraft erupt from within the townsfolk's ranks and nothing, not even the secretive Master Kent's halfhearted attempt at rooting out the truth and delivering justice, can quell the thirst for revenge that rattles the once principled town to its foundation. Walter Thirsk plays the perfect unreliable narrator; his deliberations about Master Kent's true intentions, his neighbors' guilt, and his own role in the events deepen an already resonant story. Crace's signature measured delivery and deliberate focus create unforgettably poetic passages that quiver with beauty. An electrifying return to form after All That Follows.
