Book summary

In Crace's typically strange and lyrical novel, the lives of a middle-aged married couple, murdered while making love al fresco, are examined in a narrative that moves backward in time, while simultaneously the reaction of their only daughter is explored. A New York Times "Editors' Choice" for one of the best books of 2000.

Media reviews

"The naked daring of Crace's subject matter seems to have produced prose more majestic and assured than in any of his previous novels....This story's terse, drumming, iambic utterances often come close to verse, and its wit matches the best work of any of Crace's contemporaries....These lives at first appear too unremarkable to claim our attention, and the physical facts of their end too repulsive to allow us to care, yet we are intensely involved in the drama. We understand this precisely because our rising interest in Joseph and Celice's lives keeps pace with the increasingly ghastly details of bodily death. Our caring, as Crace makes clear, is a tribute to life itself."