Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

Overview

Winner of the 1992 Booker Prize for Fiction: "Possibly the best novel I've read in the last decade."—David Halberstam

Sacred Hunger is a stunning and engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed. Filled with the "sacred hunger" to expand its empire and its profits, England entered full into the slave trade and spread the trade throughout its colonies. In this Booker Prize-winning work, Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny. Joining together, the sailors and the slaves set up a secret, utopian society in the wilderness of Florida, only to await the vengeance of the single-minded, young Kemp.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525434115
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/22/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	372,772
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Barry Unsworth (1930-2012), who won the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, was a Booker Prize finalist for Morality Play and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for The Ruby in Her Navel.

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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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

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

Washington Post

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

New York Times Book Review

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

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