Strange, unsettling, brilliant – everything you’d expect from one of our most original and inventive novelists

This could have been a straightforward political allegory about man’s inhumanity to man . . . but Crace’s seductively atmospheric novel, suffused as it is with archetypes and the stuff of dreams, is much richer, slyer and more mysterious. It’s an elegy, too – for lost love, youth and talent – and deeply moving

The Melody takes its place among his finest [novels] . . . grippingly symbolic and intensely real . . . an ecological fable for modern times

The Melody is at its most poignant on the subject of growing old . . . every sentence is packed with Crace’s characteristic lyricism . . . Anybody who reads The Melody will find plenty to admire and chew on

Hypnotic and powerful . . . enchanting and disconcerting . . . The Melody is a reminder that we neither own nor control the natural world

An ambitious, powerful work which won’t disappoint his growing band of enthusiasts

Throughout the book, Crace’s measured, subtly captivating prose is often exquisite . . . A fine book about ageing and grief and the way in which the folkloric can impact upon real life, it’s another choice example of this twice-Booker-nominated English writer’s unique gift

A powerful novel about music, human nature and poverty . . . only Kazuo Ishiguro rivals Crace’s range in terms of emotional power and unusual subject matter

The book retains a lingering power – not least in Crace’s gentle reminder that, although the personal may well be political, it’s often easier to pretend otherwise

If the novel has a political agenda, it resides in its interlocking parables of gentrification and the stigmatization of the poor . . . impeccably wrought

Jim Crace writes with great flair and inimitable imagination . . . The Melody is a lyrical and tender meditation on marital love and loss that further secures his position as one of Britain’s most distinctive and accomplished novelists . . . The simplicity, poise and conversation elegance of Crace’s prose allows him to give full rein to the expression of emotion . . . A book at once full of wry humour and achingly sad, The Melody is every bit as strange, other-worldly, and finely wrought as readers have come to expect of Crace. This is a fine contribution to the oeuvre of perhaps the most underrated novelist writing in English today.

Terrific . . . part political allegory, part dream and part deeply tender meditation on grief

As touching as a well-made melody