A remote English village wakes on the morning after harvest, looking forward to a hard-earned day of rest and feasting at the landowner's table. But two conspicuous columns of smoke mar the sky, raising alarm and suspicion in the place of peaceable satisfaction. Overnight, Master Kent's stables and his dovecote have burned. Walter Thirsk, a relative outsider who left his position as manservant in the manor house to marry a village woman, casts his eye on three local boys and blames their careless tomfoolery. But the second smoke column comes from the edge of the village land, sent up by newcomers to announce their presence. Rather than search among themselves for a culprit on whom to blame the stable fire, the villagers close ranks against the strangers. Two men and a woman are apprehended, their heads are shaved to mark their criminality, and the men are thrown in the stocks for a week. The villagers will come to regret their silence in the face of such hasty judgment. Meanwhile, another newcomer has been recently spotted in the village sporting the finer clothes and fashionable beard of a townsman. Mr. Quill, as the villagers name him, observes them closely and takes careful notes about their land, apparently at Master Kent's behest. It is his presence more than any other that will threaten the village's entire way of life. In effortless and tender prose, Jim Crace details the unravelling of a pastoral idyll in the face of economic progress. His tale is timeless and unsettling, framed by a beautifully evoked world you will remember long after you finish reading. “Glorious . . . Crace writes with a particular, haunting empathy for the displaced . . . By transposing contemporary anxieties onto distant times he allows us to feel them afresh . . . In his compassionate curiosity and his instincts for insurgent uncertainty, Crace surely ranks among our greatest novelists of radical upheaval, a perfect fit for our unstable, unforgiving age.” - New York Times " Harvest is Jim Crace at his finest. . . a timeless masterwork." - Halifax Chronicle Herald "A writer of hallucinatory skill." - John Updike "Like the best literature, Crace is always open to possibility. He seems to couple the social thrust of Steinbeck with echoes of Coetzee, McCarthy, Marquez." - Colum McCann "One of the most stunningly original novelists writing today." - Los Angeles Times JIM CRACE is the author of ten previous novels. Being Dead was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize and won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England. Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition 1 Two twists of smoke at a time of year too warm for cottage fires surprise us at first light, or they at least surprise those of us who've not been up to mischief in the dark. Our land is topped and tailed with flames. Beyond the frontier ditches of our fields and in the shelter of our woods, on common ground, where yesterday there wasn't anyone who could give rise to smoke, some newcomers, by the luster of an obliging reapers' moon, have put up their hut--four rough and ready walls, a bit of roof--and lit the more outlying of these fires. Their fire is damp. They will have thrown on wet greenery in order to procure the blackest plume, and thereby not be missed by us. It rises in a column that hardly bends or thins until it clears the canopies. It says, New neighbors have arrived; they've built a place; they've laid a hearth; they know the custom and the law. This first smoke has given them the right to stay. We'll see. But it is the second twist of gray that calls us close, that has us rushing early from our homes on this rest day toward Master Kent's house. From a distance this smoke is pale. No one has added greenery to darken it. But the blaze itself is less faint-hearted. It is rackety. It is a timber fire, for sure. But ancient wood. Long-felled. The years are in its smell. We fear it is the manor house that burns and that we will be blamed for sleeping through. We'd best prepare excuses now. So, if we heard the cracking of its rafters and its beams in our slumbers this morning, we must have mistaken it for the usual busying of trees and wind, or for the toiling of dreams, or for the groaning of our bones. Yesterday was harvest end, the final sheaf. We were expecting to sleep long and late this morning, with heavy shoulders naturally but with buoyant hearts. Our happiness has deafened us, we'll say. It was only when we heard Willowjack, the master's fancy sorrel mare, protesting at the smoke with such alarm, that we awoke and went to help, as help we must, for no one wants to lose the manor house. Now that we have reached our master's paddocks and his garths, we can smell and taste