THE PESTHOUSE

Jim Crace (Picador £16.99)

Dystopian novels - from Lord of the Flies to Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale - don't usually have happy endings. However, Jim Crace provides a glimmer of hope in his story of two lovers in a post-apocalypse, primitive America, where the politics of immigration has been reversed.

The hero, Franklin, is a teenage weakling from a dying mid-West farm who has joined his domineering older brother in the human exodus from America's toxic, unfertile heartlands, where the young and fit are all desperately migrating east, leaving lives of poverty for the dream of riches, in search of boats which will take them to richer lands ruled by men in military uniforms.

The fall of what was once the world's most powerful nation seems to have been caused by both natural disaster and self-induced destruction, but the detail is hazy. Good-hearted neighbourliness has disappeared in a land now ruled by bandits, where everyone is out for what they can get.

Crace's book Quarantine traced Christ's time in Palestine's wilderness, and the landscape of The Pesthouse is similarly bleak.

Franklin, born under an unlucky star, cannot keep up with his stronger brother and falls by the wayside, where he meets Margaret, who has been banished from her home town to a rudimentary shelter - The Pesthouse - after contracting a plague known as flux.

Franklin comes to adulthood as he nurses Margaret back to health and helps her journey to the coast. After some strange adventures - Franklin is kidnapped by slave-drivers, while Margaret picks up a baby and joins the Finger Baptists, a cult which outlaws all metal objects, believing them to be the root of all evil - they arrive at boats bound for the Promised Land.

But will they take the chance of a new life? I'll try not to spoil the ending - however, the relationship between Franklin and Margaret is one of the most believable things in this extraordinary, rather sketchily-described world.

Jim Crace will discuss the book at the Oxford Literary Festival at 4.30pm on Thursday, March 21.