Home / Forthcoming

Please scroll down for information on work-in-progress and forthcoming appearances.

New/forthcoming books

1) THE PEST HOUSE (this, the working title, has now been confirmed) – delivered 2005 for publication spring 2007

According to Jim Crace’s early thoughts, “this is a long, picaresque narrative set in the United States about two hundred years from now. The country has fragmented. The machines have stopped. The novel provides America not with a science fiction future but with something that it has always wanted and lacked - a medieval "past", an ancient European experience.

The theme is The Gift of Stones in reverse. It is not about a prehistoric community adapting itself to progress, but a modern, slightly futuristic community adapting itself to a world without science, political institutions or social coherence. Conventional Science Fiction promises a future of greater and more terrifying technology in which the global becomes the intergalactic. The future being offered and delivered by my novel is a future without technology, in which the global is reduced to the local. History summons. The Middle Ages have returned.

What will happen to culture and enlightenment when all the phones have failed and we’re sitting by the wood fires once again? Will the Medieval Americans seek a new world of greater promise? Will they take to the boats and head East?”

2) THE FINALIST (working title)

According to Jim Crace’s early thoughts, The Finalist is “on one level only, a thriller of action and ideas, but its overarching intention is to be a metaphorical critique of both political individualism and the innate complacency of Western liberal democracies.”

3) ARCHIPELAGO (working title)

“An autobiography of the imagination, with no plainly factual elements at all.”

Appearances and events

Jim Crace will be reading at:

· Lancaster University at 6pm Thursday 12th October 2006

· Lewes Live Literature at 7pm Saturday 28th October 2006

· The National Academy of Writing in Birmingham on Tuesday 7th November 2006

· Manchester University on Monday 13th November 2006

· Frankfurt on 7th December 2006

· The National Academy of Writing in Birmingham on Tuesday 16th January 2007

· DeMontfort University in Leicester on Wednesday 24th January 2007.

If you would like details please contact me (aghewitt@yahoo.com) and I will try to find out more.

Home