Jim Crace offers a real-life, mostly secular re-imagining of the biblical story of Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness. The young Galilean is just one of a group of men and women choosing to embark on a “quarantine” of fasting and prayer in caves in the Judean desert. Chance brings a grasping, immoral merchant, Musa, and his pregnant wife to the same spot, and a drama plays out that seeds the myth of this period of Jesus’s life. An intriguing story, told elegantly with a poetic rhythm. It won the 1997 Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction the same year.