Jim Crace is a writer of great gifts. He is the poet of detail, the laureate of the mineral, the bacterial and the gaseous. The people in his books are often the subjects of these forces, their lives and struggles the background to an unending and strangely lyrical but implacable play of forces beyond their control. Crace is not a writer of the moment; he is not a realist writer nor a writer looking for the witty aperçu about contemporary society, although his books contain allegorical references to the present. Instead his settings range from the Stone Age to the English coast and the Judaean desert around Qumran. Characters are often seen in a landscape, and they are not necessarily privileged by being human.