Jim Crace's biggest novel since Being Dead draws once more on his genius with landscape and myth, to create a lost and bewitching English world.

'Inimitably excellent, Jim Crace stands on his own ground among living English novelists' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 'As finely written as it is tautly structured . . . an achievement worthy to stand alongside those of William Golding' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders - two men and a dangerously magnetic woman - arrives on the woodland borders triggering a series of events that will see Walter Thirsk's village unmade in just seven days: the harvest blackened by smoke and fear, cruel punishment meted out to the innocent, and allegations of witchcraft. But something even darker is at the heart of Walter's story, and he will be the only man left to tell it . . . 'Crace is a most meticulous and original novelist and this is one of his unquestionable masterpieces' Philip Hensher, Spectator 'Jim Crace is a magician . . . no one else writes with such a strange, enchanted clarity' Evening Standard 'Extraordinary' Guardian 'Masterly, elegiac' Sunday Times Culture

Winner of the 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize
Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize
Shortlisted for the 2014 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders - two men and a dangerously magnetic woman - arrives on the woodland borders triggering a series of events that will see Walter Thirsk's village unmade in just seven days: the harvest blackened by smoke and fear, cruel punishment meted out to the innocent, and allegations of witchcraft.

But something even darker is at the heart of Walter's story, and he will be the only man left to tell it . . .