ABOUT THE BOOK

Baritone Bay, mid-afternoon. Celice and Joseph, married, middle-aged, are lying naked on the coast. They had met and first had sex there as students almost thirty years before. Now they hope to rediscover and rekindle passion in the dunes. But this will be a day for death as well as kisses, a day when murder and eternity will fail to put an end to love.

Jim Crace is the author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine and Being Dead. He has won the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, the Guardian Fiction Award and the GAP International Prize for Literature.

His novels have been translated into fourteen languages. Quarantine won the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction. Being Dead was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize. Jim Crace lives in Birmingham with his wife and two children.

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Here are some readers' thoughts on "Being Dead":

"The title of this book describes the action (or inaction) of 'being dead'. A middle-aged couple return to the scene of their first love-making thirty years before, to rekindle that time. Instead, they are battered to death. Immediately the reader expects a hunt for the killer. Instead the story is about their corpses rotting for the week before they are discovered. The couple themselves are zoologists and you can imagine they would be fascinated by the crabs and the flies eating at their corpses. There are flashbacks to their lives, how they met here at 'Baritone Bay'. How Celice fell in love with Joseph's 'baritone voice'. They were both outsiders, but yet compatible if not perfect partners. Their wayward daughter realises they are missing. She returns home and contacts the police. Eventually the bodies are found. The death of her parents liberate her into adulthood.

I found this a morbidly fascinating book, yet very romantic. Had I known the context I probably would not have read it. It was beautifully written. The descriptions were wonderful. I would highly recommend this book as a potential winner of the IMPAC Dublin Award."

Reviewed by a Member of Raheny Library Readers Group.