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Shop nowThe Quality of Mercy
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Learn moreBarry Unsworth returns to the terrain of his Booker Prize–winning novel Sacred Hunger, this time following Sullivan, the Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, son of a Liverpool slave ship owner who hanged himself. It is the spring of 1767, and to avenge his father’s death, Erasmus Kemp has had the rebellious sailors of his father’s ship, including Sullivan, brought back to London to stand trial on charges of mutiny and piracy. But as the novel opens, a blithe Sullivan has escaped and is making his way on foot to the north of England, stealing as he goes and sleeping where he can.
His destination is Thorpe in the East Durham coalfields, where his dead shipmate, Billy Blair, lived: he has pledged to tell the family how Billy met his end.
In this village, Billy’s sister, Nan, and her miner husband, James Bordon, live with their three sons, all destined to follow their father down the pit. The youngest, only seven, is enjoying his last summer aboveground.
Meanwhile, in London, a passionate antislavery campaigner, Frederick Ashton, gets involved in a second case relating to the lost ship. Erasmus Kemp wants compensation for the cargo of sick slaves who were thrown overboard to drown, and Ashton is representing the insurers who dispute his claim. Despite their polarized views on slavery, Ashton’s beautiful sister, Jane, encounters Erasmus Kemp and finds herself powerfully attracted to him.
Lord Spenton, who owns coal mines in East Durham, has extravagant habits and is pressed for money. When he applies to the Kemp merchant bank for a loan, Erasmus sees a business opportunity of the kind he has long been hoping for, a way of gaining entry into Britain’s rapidly developing and highly profitable coal and steel industries. Thus he too makes his way north, to the very same village that Sullivan is heading for …
Barry Unsworth (1930–2012) was a British novelist who wrote historical fiction. He won the Booker Prize with Sacred Hunger and was shortlisted for Pascali’s Island and Morality Play. He published seventeen novels to critical acclaim.
David Rintoul, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a stage and television actor from Scotland. A former student of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, he has worked extensively with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has also appeared regularly on BBC television, starring as Mr. Darcy in the 1980 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and as Doctor Finlay in the television series of the same name.
Reviews
“Unsworth is one of the best historical novelists on either side of the Atlantic…His vast knowledge of eighteenth-century social and material conditions creates a rich and strange rendering of daily life that’s utterly persuasive.”
“Unsworth is one of the greatest living historical novelists, and this is what he does best: he entices us back into a past gloriously appointed with archival detail and moral complexity…[The Quality of Mercy] is another engaging demonstration of the talent that’s made Unsworth one of the very few writers to appear on the Booker shortlist three times. His sentences recall the sharp detail, moral sensitivity, and ready wit of Charles Dickens. But his sense of the lumbering, uneven gait of social progress is more sophisticated, more tempered, one might say, by history.”
“Deeply moving…Unsworth brings his characters together with authority and grace. As with all of his historical novels, he conveys the sights, sounds, and smells of life in another century without the slightest hint of pedantry.”
“Instantly compelling and impeccably written…Line by line, Unsworth is a vigorous and precise writer.”
“Told with bite and freshness. Unsworth, one of the most ingenious and varied of today’s British writers, makes his scenes not just vivid but microscopically vivid—we see not only their visible life but the invisible life that pulsates beneath. But what may be more remarkable is the creative subversion he works in his characters…Unsworth gives his figures glittering definition, and then leaves them open and undefined.”
“Unsworth’s writing is as rich and authoritative as ever, his eye for the period detail as judicious.”
“Unsworth’s is a vigorous, clear-eyed approach to history, electrified by his complete feel for the period, his neat bathetic wit, and his natural gift for storytelling.”
“Immediately involving and immensely readable.”
“Thought-provoking and resonant.”
“Wryly, and with Austenesque delicacy, Unsworth presents the intricacies of love, competition, and other timeless human emotions…Having invented his own brand of historical fiction, characterized by research, imagination, and a literate narrator equally adept at penetrating a society’s values or an individual’s heart, Unsworth creates a novel that works both as period piece and indictment of industrial capitalism…It succeeds in presenting a compelling picture of a transitional moment in English history, not to mention in the development of the English character.”
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