Signals of Distress - Softcover
November 1836, and Aylmer Smith is making the voyage from his London home to coastal Wherrytown to deliver bad news. Once there he becomes embroiled with the American crew of the Belle, torn from their ship by a fierce storm and left stranded to wreak havoc in the village. A Dickensian cast of characters and Jim Craces characteristically poetic prose make for an extraordinary novel: a historical yet timeless exploration of clashing cultures, communication and technology, which sees Crace at his illuminating and expansive best.
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From the Inside Flap:
About the Author:
"Signals of Distress is an engrossing book...Crace is a genius at making round and really human characters, and his characters make his novel superb."--Newsday
November, 1836. A fierce gale beaches an American sail ship off the English coast, injuring an African slave below decks and eventually disgorging 300 head of cattle and rowdy American sailors into a hardscrabble fishing village. The same storm drives into port a steamer, bearing one Aymer Smith, the foolish well-intentioned prig who will deprive the town of its livelihood, free the African slave, and set into motion a whole series of unforeseeable, tragicomic events. One of the most seductive and surprising novelist at work today, once again creates a richly strange and believable world, uncannily familiar to our own.
"One of the brightest lights in contemporary British fiction. With beguiling narrative ease and prose lyric enough to invest the most ordinary events with mystery, Mr. Crace...lays bare the commonplace events-always unrecorded-that crystallize later as 'history.'"-- Charles Johnson, The New York Times Book Review
"Crace weaves a progressive magic into this mythic plot with masterful detail, luminous prose and haunting characterization."--The Boston Globe
JIM CRACE is the author of seven other novels, including Being Dead, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and, most recently, Genesis. He lives in Birmingham, England.
Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of ten books, including Continent (winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize), Quarantine (winner of the 1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award). He lives in Birmingham.
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- PublisherPicador
- ISBN 10 1447219430
- ISBN 13 9781447219439
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
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