by Jim Crace
First published 1999
Celice and Joseph drive to the sand dunes of Baritone Bay after thirty years of marriage. They want to revisit the spot where they met as students decades earlier. A thief attacks them with granite rocks and kills them both. Their bodies lie hidden in the dunes for six days while they are on vacation and no one expects them home. Sand crabs crawl over their skin. Flies gather around their wounds. Gulls pick at their flesh. Joseph's hand still curves around Celice's leg as insects and scavengers slowly reclaim their bodies for the earth. The story moves backward through the small choices that led them to this remote place. It moves forward through the week their corpses decompose under the open sky. Their love persists even as their cells surrender to the natural world.
Genres: fiction, drama, literary-fiction, contemporary
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Baritone Bay
Period: Thirty Years
Paperback · Picador
Content warnings: death