Quarantine

Quarantine is a novel by the English writer Jim Crace, published in 1997. It won the Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year, and it takes the forty days of fasting in the wilderness as its subject.

The travellers in the desert are a mixed company. There is a trader called Musa, who is ill with a fever when the book opens and whose wife, Miri, is pregnant and has been fasting in the hope of conceiving; there are two men fasting for the sake of their health; there is a young man on his own road; and there is a man known as the Galilean, who intends to fast for forty days and nights.

Crace treats the wilderness as a physical place rather than a stage, and the novel is as much about hunger, thirst, illness and the behaviour of people who have chosen to be uncomfortable as it is about any spiritual event. Each of the characters has a reason for being out there, and those reasons do not survive contact with each other or with the desert.