SOURCE: Review of Continent, by Jim Crace. Publisher's Weekly 231 (13 February 1987): 81-2.

In the following review, the anonymous critic praises the imagination and “unfaltering authority” of the stories in Continent.

Crace's continent is mainly dry and under-developed, peopled by bureaucrats and country folk whose conflicting values give these loosely connected chapters their essential tension. In “Electricity,” the wiring of a small village pits superstition and ancient innocence against technology and progress, leaving nothing much changed in the end. The nearly perfect “In Heat,” featuring a forest tribe whose women conceive at only one time of year, centers on the effect of their discovery by a biologist doing field work—all told in the voice of his daughter, who late in her life learns a truth about her origin. A village scribe in “Sins and Virtues” withstands cultural exploitation, remaining true to himself and his art in the face of...