All That Follows

Critically acclaimed author Jim Crace returns with a masterful and tender new novel that explores the improvisational power of jazz and the complexities of love and violence.
?
Leonard Lessing is a British jazz musician whose life has become largely predictable and stagnant. While watching the news one night he recognizes a man who is holding four hostages. The man is Maxie, a former acquaintance who he met eighteen years previously in Austin, Texas. When he meets up with Maxie's daughter Lucy, Lennie must decide whether to sit silently, as he has so many times, or find the courage to go to the crime scene and potentially save lives. A moving and insightful novel, All That Follows proves once again that Jim Crace is one of our most talented and dynamic storytellers.

Jim Crace is the author of nine previous novels, including most recently, The Pesthouse. Being Dead was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize and won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Jim Crace has also received the E.M. Forster Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England.