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Sign up todaySacred Hunger
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Learn moreSacred 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 fully into the slave trade and spread the trade throughout its colonies. In the 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.
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
“Wonderful and heartbreaking…It is a book of grace and meditative elegance, and of great moral seriousness.”
“You know you are in the hands of a master craftsman when you find yourself slowing down on page after page to savor his thoughts and words…A remarkable novel in every way.”
“Utterly magnificent…By its last page, you will be close to weeping.”
“This vast, vividly realistic historical novel follows the crew of a slave-trading vessel from its Liverpool shipyard through days at anchor bartering human cargo on the Guinea Coast…As intricate as it is immense, this masterwork rewards every turn of its 640 pages.”
“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.”
“With its graphic depiction of the 18th-century slave trade and a society driven by the desire to maximize profit regardless of the human cost, this new novel by the author of Pascali’s Island offers a dark view of human nature clearly relevant to our own time.”
“More steeped in history than Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage: a riveting, outstanding addition to an already impressive oeuvre.”
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