The Pesthouse

by JimCrace (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2008

  $22.07

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $4.12

  'The Pesthouse finds the author not just on his own best form, but arguably the best form any English writer has shown in the last couple of years' Spectator A devastated America exists in an imagined future. Its technologies are forgotten, its communities have splintered and its refugees, reversing the course of history, travel eastwards in search of safety and a new start. Among them are Franklin and Margaret, young, bereft, forced together by circumstance; but finding that love, courage and determination can endure even as a country breaks slowly apart. 'Evoking the cracked terrain of a depleted America, Crace proves himself a fine stylist, sensitive to the cadence of every sentence' Financial Times 'Entirely compelling. The story is a gripping, harrowing adventure tale and Crace's language is extraordinary ...The Pesthouse resonates like an unresolved chord' New Statesman 'Gripping, exciting and oddly romantic' Daily Mail

• Used

  Hardcover
  2007

  $3.53

  This used to be America, this river crossing in the ten-month stretch of land, this sea-to-sea. It used to be the safest place on earth. America as we know it has fragmented. Its machines have stopped, its communities have splintered, its history is virtually forgotten, and the great migration has started: eastwards, through the mountains and down the perilous Dreaming Highway, to ships rumoured to sail to a land of greater promise.Into this landscape stumbles Franklin, who has left his home only to find new ties in a pesthouse perched above a valley. Margaret, suffering the early stages of plague, has been carried up from Ferrytown to recuperate or die alone. When her village is destroyed, she and Franklin set out together, compelled to leave everything they love behind them. The Pesthouse is realized with the flair, conviction and intensity for which Crace is admired all over the world. It imagines an America adapting to a future without technology, without science, without social cohesion; and it tells of how two people find strength in one another when the world as they know it is falling apart. A writer of hallucinatory skill - John Updike.