SOURCE: Glasser, Perry. “A Stone Age Storyteller Speaks from the Dawn of Narrative Art.” Chicago Tribune Books (16 April 1989): 6.

In the following review, Glasser offers a positive assessment of The Gift of Stones.

If you share Jim Crace's concerns for language and ideas, The Gift of Stones will seem rich broth. This novel is wonderfully lucid, often musical and always thought-provoking.

In a pre-metal age, in a village by the sea, the members of a community work flint. They are impervious to attack from the horsemen who need their weapons; they prosper because merchants prize their tools for trade. When a young boy loses half his arm to a gratuitous act of violence and is incapable of working stone, he grows to manhood as a storyteller. The earnest artisans of the village grudgingly value him and his stories because his imagination enables even the dullest among them to transcend...