The pesthouse - Jim Crace

This used to be America, this river crossing in the ten-month stretch of land, this sea-to-sea. It used to be the safest place on earth.

America as we know it has fragmented. Its machines have stopped, its communities have splintered, its history is virtually forgotten, and the great migration has started: eastwards, through the mountains and down the perilous Dreaming Highway, to ships rumoured to sail to a land of greater promise. Into this landscape stumbles Franklin, who has left his home only to find new ties in a pesthouse perched above a valley. Margaret, suffering the early stages of plague, has been carried up from Ferrytown to recuperate or die alone. When her village is destroyed, she and Franklin set out together, compelled to leave everything they love behind them.

The Pesthouse is realized with the flair, conviction and intensity for which Crace is admired all over the world. It imagines an America adapting to a future without technology, without science, without social cohesion; and it tells of how two people find strength in one another when the world as they know it is falling apart.

'A writer of hallucinatory skill' John Updike