Quarantine

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [vi], 243. Black cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine.

Signed by Author to title page.

Crace's fourth novel. Winner of the 1997 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. Short-listed for the 1997 Booker Prize. A retelling of Jesus' forty-day fast in the Judean desert. Originally intended as a satire of Thatcher's misguided late 1980s "Care in the Community" policy, the project went off on its own tangent when a walk-on part by Jesus took over the novel: "I was surprised and elated when I finished writing Quarantine by how thoroughly I had been abandoned by the narrative and how exalted its tone and ambition had become."

"An extraordinary reimagining of the forty days Jesus Christ spent in the wilderness being tempted by the devil." –John Walsh, The Independent