{"product_id":"harvest-isbn-9780307278975","title":"Harvest","description":"\u003cb\u003eSOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE \u003cb\u003e• \u003c\/b\u003e In this hauntingly evoked portrait of rural life, Jim Crace skillfully unravels the delicate fabric of a community in the wake of economic progress.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In his compassionate curiosity and his instincts for insurgent uncertainty, Crace surely ranks among our greatest novelists of radical upheaval, a perfect fit for our unstable, unforgiving age.\" \u003ci\u003e—The New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eOn the morning after harvest, the inhabitants of a remote English village awaken looking forward to a hard-earned day of rest and feasting at their landowner's table. But the sky is marred by two conspicuous columns of smoke, replacing pleasurable anticipation with alarm and suspicion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne smoke column is the result of an overnight fire that has damaged the master's outbuildings. The second column rises from the wooded edge of the village, sent up by newcomers to announce their presence. In the minds of the wary villagers a mere coincidence of events appears to be unlikely, with violent confrontation looming as the unavoidable outcome. Meanwhile, another newcomer has recently been spotted taking careful notes and making drawings of the land. It is his presence more than any other that will threaten the village's entire way of life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn effortless and tender prose, Jim Crace details the unraveling of a pastoral idyll in the wake of economic progress. His tale is timeless and unsettling, framed by a beautifully evoked world that will linger in your memory long after you finish reading.\u003cb\u003eWinner of the James Tait Black Prize!\u003cbr\u003eLonglisted for the Man Booker prize!\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Jim Crace is the most generous of writers. A fabulist, an open heart, an imagination in full flight. There is something of a harvest in every book: the promise, the violence, the fall, the regain. And \u003ci\u003eHarvest\u003c\/i\u003e is one of his best novels ever. He is, quite simply, one of the great writers of our time.\"  \u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eColum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of \u003ci\u003eLet the Great World Spin\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Glorious ... \u003ci\u003eHarvest\u003c\/i\u003e calls to mind J. M. Coetzee’s finest and most allegorical novel, \u003ci\u003eWaiting for the Barbarians\u003c\/i\u003e ... Crace writes with a particular, haunting empathy for the displaced ... His plots may be epic, but his sentences carry a sensual charge ... In his compassionate curiosity and his instincts for insurgent uncertainty, Crace surely ranks among our greatest novelists of radical upheaval, a perfect fit for our unstable, unforgiving age.\" \u003ci\u003e—\u003cb\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"The most seductive and enthralling of Crace’s novels.\" \u003ci\u003e—\u003cb\u003eNew Statesman\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[\u003ci\u003eHarvest\u003c\/i\u003e] is intellectually and morally engaging while also being exciting to read ... Mr. Crace's imagery brilliantly suggests the loamy, lyric glories of rustic English language and life ... [he] devotes his considerable talents to telling an affecting tale of a bound world and its simple people as they head toward a tragic and inexorable breakdown.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Wall Street Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Surreptitiously thought-provoking ... \u003ci\u003eHarvest\u003c\/i\u003e attains a haunting and almost subversive quality.\" \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Ravishingly rich in evocations of country life ... Crace’s prose is so sensual you can’t help but believe it describes an actual material place. But this village is like the forests of the Brothers Grimm, a setting meant to be both familiar and strange. If you think Crace is only talking about the shift from the medieval to the modern world, you’d be very, very wrong.\" \u003ci\u003e—\u003cb\u003eSalon\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In language beautiful and painstakingly precise, Jim Crace circumscribes the story as neatly as a fairy tale ... Entirely absorbing.\" \u003ci\u003e—\u003cb\u003eMinneapolis Star-Tribune\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eHarvest\u003c\/i\u003e is as finely written as it is tautly structured. Pungently flavoured with archaic words, its language is exhilaratingly exact, sometimes poetic and sometimes stark. Magnificently resurrecting a pivotal moment in our history about which it is deeply knowledgeable, this simultaneously elegiac and unillusioned novel is an achievement worthy to stand alongside those of Crace’s great fictional ­influence, William Golding.\" \u003ci\u003e—\u003cb\u003eThe Sunday Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Crace, an original and a literary stylist, with, usually, something remarkable to say, says it here in a haunting work of sudden violence and vengeance ... Few novels as fine or as complex in their apparent simplicity will be published this, or indeed any, year.\" —\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eIrish Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"As with Crace's other novels, \u003ci\u003eHarvest\u003c\/i\u003e is deftly written, in language — formal, slightly archaic even — that reflects the setting it describes. It's also tightly plotted ... Crace's real concern is his characters, the way that, like all of us, they make mistakes and act from weakness, and turn on one another when things go wrong.\" —\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Crace’s signature measured delivery and deliberate focus create unforgettably poetic passages that quiver with beauty. An electrifying return to form.\" —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Rarely does language so plainspoken and elemental tell a story so richly open to interpretation on so many different levels....With economy and grace, the award-winning Crace gives his work a simplicity and symmetry that belie the disturbances beneath the consciousness of its narrator....Crace continues to occupy a singular place in contemporary literature.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003c\/b\u003eJIM CRACE is the author of ten previous novels. \u003ci\u003eBeing Dead\u003c\/i\u003e was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize and won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2000. In 1997, \u003ci\u003eQuarantine\u003c\/i\u003e was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Jim Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover Edition\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwo twists of smoke at a time of year too warm for cottage  fires surprise us at first light, or they at least surprise those of us  who've not been up to mischief in the dark. Our land is topped and  tailed with flames. Beyond the frontier ditches of our fields and in the  shelter of our woods, on common ground, where yesterday there wasn't  anyone who could give rise to smoke, some newcomers, by the luster of an  obliging reapers' moon, have put up their hut--four rough and ready  walls, a bit of roof--and lit the more outlying of these fires. Their  fire is damp. They will have thrown on wet greenery in order to procure  the blackest plume, and thereby not be missed by us. It rises in a  column that hardly bends or thins until it clears the canopies. It says,  New neighbors have arrived; they've built a place; they've laid a  hearth; they know the custom and the law. This first smoke has given  them the right to stay. We'll see.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut it is the second twist of  gray that calls us close, that has us rushing early from our homes on  this rest day toward Master Kent's house. From a distance this smoke is  pale. No one has added greenery to darken it. But the blaze itself is  less faint-hearted. It is rackety. It is a timber fire, for sure. But  ancient wood. Long-felled. The years are in its smell. We fear it is the  manor house that burns and that we will be blamed for sleeping through.  We'd best prepare excuses now. So, if we heard the cracking of its  rafters and its beams in our slumbers this morning, we must have  mistaken it for the usual busying of trees and wind, or for the toiling  of dreams, or for the groaning of our bones. Yesterday was harvest end,  the final sheaf. We were expecting to sleep long and late this morning,  with heavy shoulders naturally but with buoyant hearts. Our happiness  has deafened us, we'll say. It was only when we heard Willowjack, the  master's fancy sorrel mare, protesting at the smoke with such alarm,  that we awoke and went to help, as help we must, for no one wants to  lose the manor house.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow that we have reached our master's  paddocks and his garths, we can smell and taste the straw. The smoke and  flames are coming not from his home but from his hay lofts and his  stable roofs. His pretty, painted dovecote has already gone. We expect  to spot his home-birds' snowy wings against the smoke-gray sky. But  there are none.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI know at once whom we should blame. When  Christopher and Thomas Derby, our only twins, and Brooker Higgs came  back from wooding last evening, they seemed a little too well satisfied,  but they weren't bringing with them any fowl or rabbit for the pot, or  even any fuel. Their only spoils, so far as I could tell, were a bulky,  almost weightless sack and immodest fits of laughter. They'd been  mushrooming. And by the looks of them they had already eaten raw some of  the fairy caps they'd found. I did the same myself in my first summer  of settlement here, a dozen or so years ago, when I was greener and less  timid, though not young. I remember eating them. They are beyond  forgetting. Just as yesterday, the last sheaf of that year's harvest had  been cut and stood. And, just as today, we'd faced a break from labor,  which meant that I could sleep my mischief off. So in the company of  John Carr, my new neighbor then, my neighbor still, I went off that  afternoon to Thank the Lord for His Munificence by hunting fairy caps in  these same woods. I'll not forget the dancing lights, the rippling and  the merriment, the halos and the melting trails that followed anything  that moved, the enormous fearlessness I felt, the lasting fear (yes,  even now), or how darkly blue the moon became that night, and then how  red. I wish I'd had the courage since to try to find that moon again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLast  evening, when the twins and Brooker Higgs jaunted past our cottages and  waved at us with gill stains on their fingertips, I asked these merry  men, \"Had any luck?\" They bared their sack of spoils at once, because  they were too foxed and stupefied to conceal them, even though they  understood my ancient closeness to the manor house. I pulled aside the  dampening of leaves and inspected their few remaining fairy caps, saved  for later revels, I suppose, plus a good number of golden shawls, which,  stewed in milk and placed inside a dead man's mouth, are meant to taste  so good they'll jolt him back to life. Accounting for the bulk of their  sack was a giant moonball, its soft, kid-leather skin already smoking  spores, and far too yellowy and dry to cook. Why had they picked it,  then? Why hadn't they just given it a satisfying kick? What kind of  wayward lads were these?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere's what took place. This is my  reckoning, calculated without recourse to any constable or  magistrate--and just as well, because this place is too far off from  towns to number such judicious creatures among our livestock; we are too  small, and getting smaller. Our final day of harvesting was not as  joyful as it ought to have been, and not only because the crop proved so  frugal in the ear. A gentleman we did not recognize was watching us  reduce our barley field to stub; a visitor, a rare event, exciting and  unnerving. We mowed with scythes; he worked with brushes and with  quills. He was recording us, he said, or more exactly marking down our  land, at Master Kent's request. He tipped his drawing board for anyone  that asked and let them see the scratchings on his chart, the geometrics  that he said were fields and woods, the squares that stood for  cottages, the ponds, the lanes, the foresting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was a pleasant  man, I'd say. No more than thirty years of age and dressed much like the  master, not for labor but for the open air, in sturdy boots, breeches, a  jerkin, and a plain cap without feather, brooch or badge. His beard was  shaped and honed to a point with wax. I have a narrow trowel that  matches it. A townsman's beard. A wealthy beard. And he was lopsided  when he moved, with a stiff arm and shoulder on his left. His was a body  not well suited to the balks and bumpy edges of a field. He was a  stumbler. And there was, I thought, a trace of past illness in his  expression as well as in his step. But I've never seen a man more ready  with a smile. We could not help but stare at him and wonder, without  saying so, if those scratchings on his board might scratch us too, in  some unwelcome way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStill, there was essential work to finish  yesterday, whatever our distractions. If we hoped for sufficient grain  to last the year, we'd have to deserve it with some sweat. This summer's  yield was not yet good enough. Plenty, here, has wed itself to  Leanness. At the lower, shaded limits by the dell and on the more  neglected stony slopes our plants have proven miserly. They grew as  short, askew and weakly as our limping visitor and so were hardly worth  the reaping. But the higher field, which we left standing till the last,  has always looked more sprightly--and more promising. Since spring  we've waited with our fingers crossed as our better barley steadily  renounced its green and let itself go tawny. From the lane, looking down  toward the tracery of willows on the brook, the top end of our barley  meadow, bristling and shivering on the breeze, showed us at last its  ochers and its cadmiums, its ambers and its chromes. And the smells,  which for so long in this slow summer were faint and damp, became  nutlike and sugary. They promised winter ales and porridges. The awns  and whiskers of the barley's ears were brittle and dry enough to  chit-chat-chit every time they were disturbed, nattering with ten  thousand voices at every effort of the wind or every scarper of a  rabbit, mouse or bird. They said, \"We've had enough. Our heads are baked  and heavy now. We're dry. Bring out your blades and do your worst.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReap  and gossip. That's the rule. On harvest days, anyone who's got a pair  of legs and arms can expect to earn supper with unceasing labor. Our  numbers have been too reduced of late to allow a single useful soul to  stay away. There's not a hand that will escape the brittle straw  unscratched. The children go ahead of us, looking for the gray of any  thistle heads that have outstripped our rust-gold barley, then duck  below the level ears of grain to weed out nettles, teasels, docks;  \"dealing with the grievances,\" we say. The broadest shoulders swing  their sickles and their scythes at the brimming cliffs of stalk; hares,  partridges and sparrows flee before the blades; our wives and daughters  bundle up and bind the sheaves, though not too carefully--they work on  the principle of ten for the commons and one for the gleaning; our  creaking fathers make the lines of stooks; the sun begins to dry what we  have harvested. Our work is consecrated by the sun. Compared to winter  days, let's say, or digging days, it's satisfying work, made all the  more so by the company we keep, for on such days all the faces we know  and love (as well as those I know but do not like entirely) are gathered  in one space and bounded by common ditches and collective hopes. If,  perhaps, we hear a barking deer nagging to be trapped and stewed, or a  woodcock begging to make his hearse in a pie, we lift our heads as one  and look toward the woods as one; we straighten up as one and stare at  the sun, reprovingly, if it's been darkened by a cloud; our scythes and  hand tools clack and chat in unison. And anything we say is heard by  everyone. So there is openness and jollity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe harvest teamwork  allows us to be lewd. Our humor ripens as the barley falls. It's safe to  spread the gossip noisily, it's safe to bait and goad, Who's sharing  wives? Which bearded bachelor is far too friendly with his goat? Which  widower (they look at me) has dipped his thumb in someone else's pot?  Which blushing youngsters are the village spares, that's to say those  children who've been conceived in one man's bed and then delivered in  another's? Who's making love to apple tubs? Who's wedded to a sack of  grain? Nothing is beyond our bounds, when we are cutting corn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo  it was hardly a surprise yesterday that once \"Mr. Quill\" in Master  Kent's close company was attending with his survey sticks and measuring  tapes to the shape and volume of our fallow field and so beyond hearing,  we wondered, out loud, whether our visiting townsman had ever overcome  his undisguised deficiencies to secure himself a willing wife. Was he a  husband yet? And, if he was, what blushing pleasures might Mistress  Quill take from such staggering and stiffness and from having such a  likeness of her hairy private part upon her stumbling lover's chin? \"I'd  like to take a scythe to him,\" said my neighbor John. Another said,  \"I'd rather take my wooden staff to her.\" And then of course the  bawdiness increased with such play on the prospect of caressing Mr.  Quill's three-cornered beard and Mistress Quill's twin attribute that  every time that evening and in our company he ruminated with his hand  around his chin, as was his habit, the women there could barely plug  their grins while their men looked on, biting their lips. \"And have you  noticed his white hands?\" one of our village daughters asked. \"I wonder  if he's ever dirtied them . . . other than to . . .\" No, she would not  finish. What she had in mind did not seem possible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was only  when the gentleman returned in the fullness of the afternoon and stood  at our backs on the bristle of the field to quantify and measure us that  we began again to wonder what awaited these treasured neighborhoods and  to feel uneasy. What was he wanting from our soil, what were his charts  securing? We saw his finger wagging on the count. We heard him  numbering, until he reached the paltry fifty-eight that represented us.  We know enough to understand that in the greater world, flour, meat and  cheese are not divided into shares and portions for the larder, as they  are here, but only weighed and sized for selling. Was Mr. Quill the  confirmation of the rumor that had gone about our doors that Master Kent  was in such narrows now he was a widower that he would need to measure  and sell our land? No amount of openness and jollity could raise our  spirits once that fear took hold. Our observer's ready smile was  menacing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe were slow to broadcast our alarm. But we tackled our  last barley stands more silently, less lewdly--and more scrupulously,  as we were being watched. Now each barking deer or woodcock call was a  warning. Each darkling cloud reminded us how nothing in our fields was  guaranteed. We only muttered to ourselves, too anxious to raise our  voices loud enough to reach our neighbors down the reaping line. Some of  the younger men set faces which declared they'd defend our acres with  their lives or with the lives of anyone that crossed them. The usual  silent swagger. Rather than speak up, they turned their anger on the  pigeons and the rooks, and on a handful of our master's near-white  doves, which had descended on the stub and were already robbing fallen  grain that, by ancient gleaning rights, should have been ours. These  \"snowy devils,\" their out-of-season whiteness making them seem even more  coldly pea-eyed and acquisitive than their gray and black companions,  were feasting on our bread and ale, they said, and sent the children to  use their slings or shower them with handfuls of grit or yell the  thieves away, anything to evidence our tenancy. The air was full of  wings and cries. So our final harvesting gained ground.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy my  account, once our complicated working day was done and all our  flat-eared barley was gathered in and carted away, the Derby twins and  Brooker Higgs, unmarried men in a village dismayingly short of unmarried  women, set off for the woods, while most of us, the rest of us,  restored ourselves at home, took stock. We shook our heads and searched  our hearts, until we had persuaded ourselves that Master Kent was too  good and just a man to sell our fields. He'd always taken care of us.  We'd always taken care of him. Besides, what was the evidence of any  sale? A bearded, skew-whiff gentleman? A chart? The counting of our  heads? No, we should not be mistrustful. We should face the rest day  with easy hearts, and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with  our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should  expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on  through the harvests and the years. Everything was bound to keep its  shape. That's what we thought. We were calm and leisurely. But, unlike  the three bachelors, we had not found and eaten fairy caps and then  concocted ways of getting even with the thieving birds, especially the  white ones from the master's cote. Nor had we stumbled on a moonball,  fatter than a blacksmith's head, but too tindery to eat. Such a dry and  hollow moonball is good, as any tree scamp knows, for taking flames from  here to there. It's good, if you are so inclined, while everybody  sleeps and only night's black agents are at work, for taking fire into  the master's yards.A Novel","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303729254629,"sku":"NP9780307278975","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307278975.jpg?v=1767728753","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/harvest-isbn-9780307278975","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}