SOURCE: Review of The Devil's Larder, by Jim Crace. Kirkus Reviews 69, no. 16 (15 August 2001): 1144.

In the following review, the anonymous critic deems the stories in The Devil's Larder as beguiling and worthwhile.

The award-winning British author of such inventive and memorable fiction as Quarantine (1997) and Being Dead (2000) enters new territory with this beguiling collection [The Devil's Larder] of 64 very short stories about what may as well be called the metaphysics of food.

Crace prefaces these untitled pieces with a tantalizing pseudo-biblical epigraph including the orotund declaration, “Nor is there honey in the devil's larder.” Then he treats us to freely ranging anecdotes (some a single paragraph, none more than a half-dozen pages) that dramatize with terse wit the exigencies of appetite and custom as expressed in both seemingly realistic and expressly parabolic terms. Several take the form of genetic character contrast: a woman who finds love in middle age...