Continent - Hardcover

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Published in Britain in 1986, this unusual, highly imaginative work won the David Higham and the Whitbread awards for best first fiction as well as the Guardian Fiction Prize. Made up of seven short stories or fables set in Third World environments, the book focuses primarily on the tensions and misunderstandings created when the "different and modern" begins to encroach on the "traditional and primitive." The results are both humorous and tragic. One marvelous line from a story about a calligrapher ordered by his government to produce "art" for sale in the West sums it up best: "Dollars cannot tell doodles from the hand of God." Yet this is not simply a geopolitical novel, for each of us at some point finds our traditional beliefs challenged. How successfully do we respond? Highly recommended for collections of serious fiction.David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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 workall 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 profit and greed. Crace's imagination is fabulous, conjuring landscapesurban and ruralthat are concrete, credible and mythic at once. It's a topography of the interior, where primitive magical explanations of phenomena are as adequate (and inadequate) as those of progress and technology. Distinguished by unfaltering authority and range of voice, Crace's novel has been awarded the Whitbread and the David Higham prizes in England. This is stunningly powerful, visionary writing.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.