His novel Quarantine, won the Whitbread Novel award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. James "Jim" Crace is an award-winning English writer. Rich in its understanding of America’s history and ethos, it is a paean to the human spirit. The Pesthouse is Jim Crace’s most compelling novel to date. Confronted by bandits rounding up men for slavery, finding refuge in the Ark, a religious community that makes bizarre demands on those they shelter, Franklin and Margaret find their wariness of each other replaced by deep trust and an intimacy neither one has ever experienced before.
Tentatively, the two join forces and make their way through the ruins of old America. Inside he finds Margaret, a woman with a deadly infection and confined to the Pesthouse to sweat out her fever. In the woods near his temporary refuge, Franklin comes upon an isolated stone building. Across the country, families have packed up their belongings to travel eastward toward the one hope passage on a ship to Europe.įranklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, are only days away from the ocean when Franklin, nearly crippled by an inflamed knee, is forced to stop. Farmlands lie fallow and the soil is contaminated by toxins. Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States is now a lawless, scantly populated wasteland. In The Pesthouse he imagines an America of the future where a man and a woman trek across a devastated and dangerous landscape, finding strength in each other and an unexpected love. Jim Crace is a writer of spectacular originality and a command of language that moves a reader effortlessly into the world of his imagination.
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