Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

Overview

Winner of the Booker Prize

Liverpool, 1752. William Kemp has lost a fortune in cotton speculation, and must recoup his losses if his son is to marry the wealthy woman whom he loves. His last resort is a slave ship, one that will take him to the Guinea coast, where he will trade for human cargo, then embark on the infamous Middle Passage. When disease ravages the ship and the African prisoners mutiny, William’s profit-seeking venture falls apart. Slaves and sailors alike will join together to found a utopian community on the coast of Florida—not knowing that the vengeful, younger Kemp is in pursuit. Unsworth’s tour de force is a profound meditation on the sacred hunger—the greed—couched within human nature, animating the slave trade. It is a novel that transcends its setting, illuminating larger truths that resonate to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525434115
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/22/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	640
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Barry Unsworth was born in 1930 and grew up in a mining town in northeast England. Descended from a long line of coal miners, he was the first Unsworth to escape the mines. He attended Manchester University and published his first novel, The Partnership, in 1966. He is the author of seventeen books, including The Ruby in Her Navel, longlisted for the Booker Prize; Pascali’s Island and Morality Play, both shortlisted for the Booker; and Sacred Hunger, co-winner of the Booker Prize. He died in 2012 at the age of eighty-one.

Read an Excerpt

The ship he meant was the Liverpool Merchant, Captain Saul Thurso, and he had never seen her, though she carried the seeds Of all his dreams in her hold.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Sacred Hunger"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Barry Unsworth.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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What People are Saying About This

David Halberstam

Possibly the best novel I've read in the last decade.

Editorial Reviews

A remarkable novel in every way. . . . Beautifully written. . . . Brilliant.” —The New York Times 

“Brilliantly suspenseful. . . . A masterly meditation on how avarice dehumanizes the oppressor as well as the oppressed.” —Chicago Tribune

“Completely absorbing in its irony, its striking imagery, its fully realized characters and its sure and complex moral touch.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Utterly magnificent.” —The Washington Post

“Wonderful and heartbreaking. . . . A book of grace and meditative elegance, and of great moral seriousness.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Utterly accessible and hauntingly executed. . . . A profound sense of time and place that’s worthy of Dickens. . . . A completely satisfying literary experience and a great story, wonderfully well told.” —David Halberstam, author of The Coldest Winter

“Sacred Hunger triumphs on two levels: as a rippingly good historical drama and as a serious moral tale. All the surface pleasures of the former—stirring adventure passionate characters, epic length, a carefully detailed look at a long, lost world—combine brilliantly with the richness of the latter. No wonder the Book Prize committee chose to honor it.” —The Seattle Times

“Like Conrad, Unsworth is a novelist whose work is dense with plotting and pacing, and rich in both writing and sheer storytelling.” —Newsday

“[Unsworth] has given us a real, sweating, breathing, bleeding, complex world, a world in which blacks sell other blacks into slavery and whites flog and cheat each other to turn a profit, and a few heroic men and women of both races struggle toward justice against the prevailing social values and their own fears and doubts.” —Los Angeles Times

“Superb. . . . Magnificent. . . . at once an adventure novel, a novel of idea, and a novel of richly realized character.” —Buffalo News

“[Sacred Hunger] has an obvious brilliance which will cast its own light. . . . A magnificent novel.” —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

From the Publisher

A masterful, thoroughly engrossing tale from acclaimed historical novelist Unsworth (Pascali's Island, 1980; Stone Virgin, 1986)—about the British slave trade in the mid-18th century and a shipboard mutiny from which arose a community based on racial equality. Through the perspectives of Erasmus Kemp, son of the shipowner and an obsessive, insensitive youth; and Matthew Paris—his cousin, a doctor (and ship's physician) recently imprisoned for publishing his seditious views in favor of evolution—Unsworth contrasts imagery of a genteel life in England with an increasingly brutal, barbaric existence under the command of the maniacal Captain Thurso. As slaves are collected from traders along the African coast, the fortunes of the owner decline precipitously, with his suicide and the ruin of Erasmus's fanciful plans of empire-building and grandeur through a good marriage the result. Becalmed, the ship's human cargo begins to sicken and die, and an increasingly vexed Thurso opts to alleviate matters by throwing ailing slaves overboard—an act spurring Paris and the crew to kill him. After landing on the remote coast of Florida, ex-slaves and sailors live in freedom for 12 years—inspired by the utopian ideals of an itinerant artist picked up in Africa—until they are captured by soldiers under Erasmus, who, consumed by the same sacred hunger for wealth that made chattel of human beings, has spared no effort to hunt down the cousin whom he blames for the loss of his dream. Intense in its elaboration of two vastly different visions of destiny and cause-and-effect, more steeped in history than Charles Johnson's Middle Passage: a riveting, outstanding addition toan already impressive oeuvre.

Kirkus Reviews

"This brilliantly suspenseful period piece about the slave trade in the 18th century is also a meditation on how avarice dehumanizes the oppressor as well as the oppressed."

Chicago Tribune

"Wonderful and heartbreaking....It is a book of grace and meditative elegance, and of great moral seriousness."

New York Times Book Review

"Utterly magnificent....By its last page, you will be close to weeping."

Washington Post