WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD. A couple lie naked in the dunes at Baritone Bay, at the spot where, almost thirty years before, they had first had sex as students. Nostalgia has sent Celice and Joseph back to their singing stretch of coast, but in the seeming calm of the afternoon they meet a brutal and unexpected fate – one which will still their bodies but not their love, and certainly not their story.Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award A couple lie naked in the dunes at Baritone Bay, at the spot where, almost thirty years before, they had first had sex as students. Nostalgia has sent Celice and Joseph back to their singing stretch of coast, but in the seeming calm of the afternoon they meet a brutal and unexpected fate – one which will still their bodies but not their love, and certainly not their story.

‘An extraordinarily moving love story’ Observer, ‘A work of near-genius’ Literary Review, ‘A swirling symphonic celebration of the glory of the natural world’ The Times, ‘Intensely imagined and deeply felt’ Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times, ‘One of the most haunting books I read this year’ Carol Shields, Guardian

Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of eleven 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.