One of the few left standing is a 31-year-old woman named Margaret, suffering from some lethal infection and thus condemned to a pesthouse in the hills above the town. The novel opens with a scene of mass death - a community, Ferrytown, is devastated by a mudslide that unearths poison gas and kills the inhabitants with merciful speed. What is best forgotten never fully emerges, though the regression to a Dark Ages state of mind is incriminating enough. We learn what has been lost by the treasures kept: a silver necklace, 'old enough to have been machined,' a square of factory-woven cloth, a few coins from 'the best-forgotten days.' The world has been reduced to a barter society: Men repair fishing nets in return for cooking pots or a little food. They are headed east, toward the ships - a vague, mythic idea that promises passage to a better place, to Europe, from where no one ever returns. The lands are unfarmed and covered with toxins and debris people, the ones left, move in suspicious throngs by foot or beast toward some semblance of a new life. Industry has become an odd relic of the past so, too, have medical knowledge and the near-infinite nuances of a modern urban social order. 'The Pesthouse' is no less a dark envisioning, though it lacks the startling high-wire act of 'Being Dead,' creating instead a tooth-and-claw society in the wilds of America, somewhere on the other side of global catastrophe.

Crace's gimlet-eyed realism produced a stunning novel in 'Being Dead,' which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and somehow made death itself part of the ongoing march that is life. But he is best known in America for his 2000 novel, 'Being Dead,' in which the two main characters, a middle-aged couple murdered on the beach, emerge as their endgame selves - two bodies decaying in the sand, their living memories freed from the inexorable triumph of the shroud. The author of eight previous works of fiction, Jim Crace is a British writer hugely admired by his peers for the depth and range of his subject matter and the gorgeous resonance of his prose.

The pesthouse by jim crace