SOURCE: Stonehill, Brian. Review of Continent, by Jim Crace. Los Angeles Times Book Review (12 April 1987): 4.

In the following review, Stonehill offers a positive assessment of Continent.

Here are seven related short stories that arrive on our shores already wreathed in praise. Jim Crace's Continent won England's Whitbread Prize for the best first “novel” of 1986, and the David Higham Prize for the year's best first work of fiction. Continent seems more strangely native to our New World, though, than to the Old.

The stories take place, for one thing, in an exotic locale that seems to be Latin American, although the fanciful names suggest some generic Third World. And Crace dips his pen in an unstable mixture of fiction and fact, a blend made popular south of the border by the “magical realists” of the Latin American “boom.”

In “Cross Country,” for instance, a visiting Canadian schoolteacher, who amuses...