Although I've only read a few of his books, Crace's last one, 2013's 'Harvest', was my favorite to win that year's Booker Prize (alas, it didn't!), and I was saddened to learn he was planning to retire from writing and there would be no new Crace novels. Lucky for us, he decided against that plan and we now have his lovely, elegiac twelfth novel ... something akin to Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' in that it both recapitulates and sums up much of what had gone before, through the wise eyes of an elderly man coming to grips with mortality.

The story is rather simple ... it details a few days in the life of an unnamed town's celebrated citizen, one Alfred Busi, a renowned singer who is to be given a statue commemorating his career in the Avenue of Fame, with an accompanying farewell concert. The day before he is to be honored, he is attacked in his kitchen larder, by what he insists might be a feral child living in 'the bosk', a forested wilderness adjoining the town. He also learns his nefarious nephew is planning to knock down Busi's lifelong residence in favor of luxury condos. Busi's adjustment to these two encumbrances is Crace's contemplative means of addressing many of society's current ills in the post Brexit/Trump universe. Hopefully there will be additional entries to the Crace canon - but if not, he has certainly left us with one of the crowning achievements of his own illustrious career.

My sincere thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday for providing me with an ARC of this book a full 7 months prior to publication, in exchange for this honest review.