On the strength of his six published novels, all critically well received and popularly successful, Jim Crace is one of the most highly esteemed fiction writers in Great Britain. He started late, at least by comparison to some of his contemporaries, having had a career as a journalist for sixteen years before the success of his first novel, Continent, in 1986. Crace claims to have read little of the work that has been said to have influenced him, and each of his books is a dramatic departure from the last, helping him to maintain relative freedom from being assigned to a prescribed "place" in the British literary world or its tradition. In a review of Crace's first book for The New York Times Book Review (28 June 1987), Robert Olen Butler declared, "One of the basic tasks of fiction is to strip down and rearrange experience in order to distance the...