Where to start with Jim Crace

British novelist, born 1946. Won the Costa Novel Award in 1997.

Best Jim Crace book to start with: Quarantine (1997), on 2 of the 20 lists it could have made.

Harvest is a good first Crace. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 and the Walter Scott Prize in 2014. A village is gathering its crop when strangers arrive, and its way of life begins to shift. The land and the work are described in close detail, so it reads as much like a place as a story.

Quarantine won the Costa Novel Award in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Booker that year. It imagines pilgrims in the desert for forty days, one of whom is Jesus, and it is the most demanding of the three, though it makes a good second book.

Being Dead, shortlisted for the Costa in 1999, opens with a couple found dead on a beach and moves back through their lives. It is the most unusual in form, and it suits a reader who is happy to look at its subject head on. Leave it until you have read one of the others.