SOURCE: Deveson, Richard. “The Prehistoric Future.” Times Literary Supplement (2–8 September 1988): 952.

In the following review, Deveson offers a generally positive assessment of The Gift of Stones, comparing the novel to William Golding's The Inheritors.

How did Stone Age people speak, how did they tell stories, and—if, like Jim Crace, you are a writer independent-minded enough to set a novel in the Stone Age—should you try to imitate them? In The Inheritors, William Golding's narrative idiom was surprisingly simple, enabling his reconstruction of a Neanderthal thought-world to seem correspondingly far-reaching and credible. On the face of it, Crace's method in The Gift of Stones (which follows his first, widely acclaimed book, Continent) is more dramatic in a purely stylistic sense. He avoids as many Latinate words as he can, and crams the book instead with Germanic monosyllables thick with fricatives and stops: hoof, wrack, scalp, knap, rind, tump...