It probably isn't advisable to eat while reading The Devil's Larder for Crace's book isn't one of those happy luxuriant food books full of recipes and people devouring chocolate for sensual gratification. For this is a book of modern fairytales and if you remember fairytales from your childhood, everything isn't always pleasant..! It's about what happens to people in situations with food, the effect food can play in our life from waiters, to honeymooners, to tourists, to an old man who grows bulbous plants in his bowel, to people experimenting with hallucinogenic food, to family myths of granny's cooking.

Crace is a beautiful storyteller and this book is no different. If you enjoyed the Crace of Being Dead where the decomposing bodies of Celice and Joseph read very much like ingredients from The Devil's Larder, then you're likely to enjoy this.

His prose, as usual, is sharp, exquisite, never hurried and always lucid. He is a playful moralist. He enjoys thinking of odd consequences, dubious effects and yet everything works beautifully.

The novel is inhabited by an endless array of characters whom we only met briefly. It isn't a true novel in the sense of unity of characters, nor is it a series of short stories as many of them have no true story arc, and wouldn't hold up by themselves. Instead it is a series of vignettes, glimpses, windows into a fairytale world of white food at a completely fastidious white wedding, whistling waiters, blind pies full of hate: "You should have been born a girl," they'd say, "Mother only wanted girls. You'll see how much she loves you when she serves the pie."

In all, the novel adds up to a visit to an exuberant world of activity. Here food is the plot device, where the devil picks mushrooms, mussels are used by disgruntled cooks to injure passing tourists, the widow who in enjoys her widowhood takes revenge on her dead husband who had so enjoyed life and neglected her, a woman pissing on mussels while gathering them and wonders at the off taste when they are cooked. In one story Crace employs the supermarket loyalty card and one man's purchases to show his sad life - no girlfriend, fat, broke: "Suggest to him he tours our shelves again, for what we choose is what we are. He should not miss the second opportunity to recreate himself with food."

The book doesn't fall into the classic trap of equating food with sex - though of course the book abounds with sensual details and innuendos. The stories are playful, teasing with semi-seriousness. So well has Crace fooled people into believing his world that they fail to discern the impish humour at work here. You only have to read the opening epigram to grasp this immediately. It reads: "There are no bitter fruits in heaven, nor is there honey in the Devil's Larder. " Visitations 7:11

One of my favourite stories is about shy honeymooners who decide not to have sex. They are at a beautiful, isolated beach and dine on bread, samphire and freshly shot pigeon. Later they eat roots from sea holly and this has a strange effect on the woman: "she felt like driftwood she had gathered on the beach - compact and dry and silvery and, somehow, not as heavy as she ought to be, as her insides had been tunnelled out by worms, her splinters and corners were removed and she became a lizard with five limbs, and she became a boomerang, and she became a root."

Though The Devil's Larder is a lighter book than some of his previous work, there is no doubting from this that Crace is one of the most remarkable of modern writers and a rumour abounds that two novels down the line he is planning to give up novels. I hope this proves not to be the case.

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Jai Clare workshopped with Jim Crace at the Arvon Foundation this November, 2001, on her novel, The Storyhouse.

She can testify to both his mischievous wit and generous spirit, both as a person, (though he pretends not to like socializing,) and as a critic. During their studies, Jai says Crace gave liberally to her and her fellow participants, and they benefited enormously. Though he does have a fondness for professional cycling, she jokes that it shouldn't be held against him!