The Gift of Stones was published by Secker & Warburg in 1988. The setting is a village of flint-knappers at the end of the Stone Age — a community of craftspeople who have refined their skill over generations to produce the finest tools and weapons. Into this community of workers is born a boy who loses his arm to a stray arrow and cannot knap flint. He survives by becoming the village’s first storyteller — trading entertainment for food, embellishing his travels beyond the village into elaborate fictions.
The novel is a parable about the birth of art: the storyteller emerges precisely where utility fails. The boy cannot make things with his hands, so he makes things with his words. His stories are not true — he admits this freely — but they serve a function the community needs: they provide alternative realities, imaginary solutions to real problems, and the consolation of pattern imposed on chaos.
The crisis comes when bronze arrives — traders with metal tools that render flint obsolete overnight. The community’s ancient craft becomes worthless in a single generation. Only the storyteller — whose skill is not material but imaginative — can adapt. Crace’s fable asks what role art serves in human communities: not the production of luxury goods but the provision of the only portable technology that survives the collapse of everything else.
Collecting The Gift of Stones
First edition (Secker & Warburg, London, 1988): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40