Barry Unsworth Books In Order

Sacred Hunger

Winner of the 1992 Booker Prize for Fiction: ‘Possibly the best novel I’ve read in the last decade.’ David HalberstamSacred 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.

The Quality of Mercy

The Quality of Mercy opens in the spring of 1767, in the immediate aftermath of the events in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. It follows the fortunes of two central characters from that book: Sullivan, an Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, the son of a disgraced Liverpool slave ship owner who hanged himself. 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 and scamming as he goes. His destination is the colliery village where his dead shipmate, Billy Blair, lived: he has pledged to tell the family how Billy met his end. In this village, Thorpe in the East Durham coalfields, live Billy’s sister Nan and her miner husband, James Bordon. Their three sons are all destined to follow their father down the pit. The youngest, only 7, is enjoying his last summer above ground. The terrible conditions in which mineworkers laboured are vividly evoked, and Bordon has dreams of escaping the mine with his family. Meanwhile in London a passionate anti slavery campaigner, Frederick Ashton, gets involved in a second case relating to the lost ship. Erasmus Kemp is claiming financial compensation for the cargo of sick slaves who were thrown overboard to drown, and Ashton is representing the insurers who dispute his claim. Ashton triumphs in court, but not before his beautiful sister, Jane, has encountered Erasmus Kemp and found herself powerfully attracted to him despite their polarised views on slavery. She discovers that Kemp wants to spend some of his sugar and slavery fortune on Britain’s new industries: coal mining and steel. A landowner father of a friend of Jane’s tips him off about Lord Spenton’s mines, for sale in East Durham, and Kemp sees the business opportunity he has been waiting for. Thus he too makes his way north, to the very same village that Sullivan is heading for…

The Partnership

Booker Prize winning author Barry Unsworth’s first novel, published for the first time in the United States. Foley and Moss are partners in a successful small business, making plaster pixies for the tourist trade. Foley is the artistic member of The Partnership; he thinks up the ideas and designs and has pretensions to even greater artistry in his cherub lamps and fixtures. Moss, the seemingly quiet one who supplied the capital for the venture, manufactures them. Barry Unsworth sets his scene magnificently a Cornish village, Lanruan, thriving on specious tourism, and its local characters: Graham, the primitive painter; Bailey, the loud mouthed Northerner who comes to Lanruan to make his fortune; Barbara, the nearest thing the village possesses to a bad girl; and above all Gwendoline, who, inadvertently, begins the rift in The Partnership between Foley and Moss. The Partnership is a disquieting, darkly funny tale about hidden desires and the unspoken attachments we have for one another.

The Hide

‘ The Hide has it all: imagination, character, dialogue and above all, plot…
. It’s a scary book, written by a master tale teller.’ Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThis early work by the Booker Prize winning author Barry Unsworth chronicles one of his literary obsessions the corruption of innocence and forms it into a compelling contemporary narrative set in the rambling, overgrown grounds of an English estate. There, relying on his rich sister Audrey’s beneficence, Simon obsessively digs a secret system of tunnels from which to spy on others. When Josh, a good looking na f, becomes a gardener at Audrey’s home, the two women of the household, Audrey and her distant relative and housekeeper, Marion, find Josh’s strength and seeming innocence a potent spell, and his response escalates unacknowledged tensions between them. Meanwhile, Simon, worried about Josh, takes steps to prevent the exposure of his underground labyrinth. The explosive chemistry between the characters will eventually rip apart and rearrange all their lives.

Mooncranker’s Gift

In this edgy and masterfully written novel, Booker Prize winning author Barry Unsworth explores the themes of the corruption of innocence and the complications of lust. Farnaby, a young Englishman in Istanbul researching a thesis on Ottoman fiscal policy, is nervous at his reunion with the celebrated Mooncranker who once so fatefully influenced and disturbed his life. Mooncranker, a famous intellectual, is now a pitiful alcoholic deserted by his secretary and lover Miranda the woman Farnaby secretly loved with the violence of youth. Mooncranker sends him to find Miranda at a notorious Turkish spa on the grounds of an ancient city where sex is known to come along with the price of the room. There Farnaby tries to understand Mooncranker’s Gift to him as a boy of thirteen, which has tainted his life ever since, as he finds himself a pivotal figure in the eccentric destinies of the other residents of the spa.

The Big Day

It was a big day for Cuthbertson’s Regional School, and it would go off like a bomb. Donald Cuthbertson prided himself on being a model for his students and teachers, but he had lately begun to lose his focus. Degree Day is approaching, along with a birthday party for his wife, Lavinia, who is not going quietly into middle age. Her lavish costume party provides the revelers with a darkly comic resolution to romantic dalliance and political intrigue.

Pascali’s Island

The year is 1908, the place, a small Greek island in the declining days of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. For twenty years Basil Pascali has spied on the people of his small community and secretly reported on their activities to the authorities in Constantinople. Although his reports are never acknowledged, never acted upon, he has received regular payment for his work. Now he fears that the villagers have found him out and he becomes engulfed in paranoia. In the midst of his panic, a charming Englishman arrives on the island claiming to be an archaeologist, and charms his way into the heart of the woman for whom Pascali pines. A complex game is played out between the two where cunning and betrayal may come to haunt them both. Pascali’s Island was made into a feature film starring Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren.

The Rage of the Vulture

Robert Markham is an Englishman in 1908 Constantinople. The Ottoman world is crumbling and Markham is a new appointee to the British legation in Turkey. Twelve years before, he had watched helplessly as his Armenian fiance had been brutally raped and murdered, Now he seeks revenge amid the breakdown of the Turkish empire.

Stone Virgin

A mysterious sculpture of a beautiful and erotic Madonna holds the key to the Fornarini family’s secrets. When Raikes, a conservation expert, tries to restore her, he is swept under the statue’s spell and that of Chiara Litsov, a member of the Fornarini family. Raikes finds himself losing all moral grounding as his love for statue and woman intertwine in lust and murder.

Sugar and Rum

A ‘powerfully done’ Times Literary Supplement and tantalizingly semi autobiographical novel from the author of the Booker Prize winning Sacred Hunger. Unable to work on his novel about Liverpool’s slave trade, Benson is teaching creative writing and wandering the city. The pupils who bring him their fantasies are a sad, dispossessed group with varying degrees of literary talent. Caught up in a series of bizarre events, Benson nevertheless finds his own imagination sparked by an encounter with two old army colleagues: Thompson, down and out and homeless; and Slater, a fabulously wealthy entrepreneur. In trying to heal old wounds, Benson unleashes a plan that just may blow up in his face. ‘There is a violent resolution to this obsessive and provocative novel that examines the abscesses and abysses beneath the violence of urban life and offers a quixotic personal answer.’ The Times London ‘Fine descriptive writing and spirited humanity.’ The Guardian Published for the first time in the United States Booker Prize winning author of Sacred Hunger

The Greeks Have a Word for It

When two men disembark from the same boat in Greece, their lives accidentally and frighteningly intersect. Kennedy, an opportunist, orchestrates a scam that will have some intended and some thoroughly unintended consequences. For Mitsos, an unresolved family tragedy awakens again, along with his need to avenge his parents’ deaths. With utterly convincing characterizations, Barry Unsworth brings us the underbelly of the forge of Western civilization.

Morality Play

The national bestseller: A medieval murder mystery full of the wonders of the time and lessons for our own time by a master storyteller. The time is the fourteenth century. The place is a small town in rural England, and the setting a snow laden winter. A small troupe of actors accompanied by Nicholas Barber, a young renegade priest, prepare to play the drama of their lives. Breaking the longstanding tradition of only performing religious plays, the groups leader, Martin, wants them to enact the murder that is foremost in the townspeoples minds. A young boy has been found dead, and a mute and deaf girl has been arrested and stands to be hanged for the murder. As members of the troupe delve deeper into the circumstances of the murder, they find themselves entering a political and class feud that may undo them. Intriguing and suspenseful, Morality Play is an exquisite work that captivates by its power, while opening up the distant past as new to the reader.

After Hannibal

Barry Unsworth, the Booker Prize winning author of Sacred Hunger and the bestselling Morality Play, returns in top form with this worldly, bittersweet comedy of manners and morals set in one of Italy’s most glorious and historically treacherous regions. Golden Umbria is home to breathtaking scenery and great art; it is also where Hannibal and his invading band of Carthaginians ambushed and slaughtered a Roman legion, and where the local place names still speak of that bloodshed. Unsworth’s contemporary invaders include the Greens, a retired American couple seeking serenity among the Umbrian hills, who are bilked out of their savings by the corrupt English ‘building expert’ Stan Blemish; the Chapmans, a British property speculator and his wife, whose dispute with their neighbors over a wall escalates into a feud of nearly medieval proportions; Anders Ritter, a German haunted by the part his father played in a mass killing of Italian hostages in Rome during the Second World War; and Fabio and Arturo, a gay couple who, searching for peace and self sufficiency, find treachery instead. And at the center of all these webs of deceit and greed is the cunning lawyer Mancini, happy to aid the disputants and to exploit to the fullest the faith that these ‘innocents abroad’ have placed in him. Mining his genius for historical narrative as well as his gift for sharp eyed portraiture and deliciously droll storytelling, Barry Unsworth has written a marvelous entertainment. After Hannibal is one of this remarkable author’s finest creations.

Losing Nelson

‘Stunningly original…
. Pulpy and juicy, full of wisdom and horror.’ Los Angeles Times Book ReviewLosing Nelson is a novel of obsession, the story of Charles Cleasby, a man unable to see himself separately from the hero Lord Horatio Nelson he mistakenly idolizes. He is, in fact, a Nelson biographer run amok. He is convinced that Nelson, Britain’s greatest admiral, who lost his own life defeating Napoleon in the Battle of Trafalgar, is the perfect hero. However, in his research he has come upon an incident of horrifying brutality in Nelson’s military career that simply stumps all attempts at glorification. ‘Books about the sea and those who sail it are much in vogue. This seems to have been set off by the surprising and much deserved popularity of Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, not to mention the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian…
. Losing Nelson is the best book of the lot.’ Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World 1999 Critic’s Choice. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1999; A New York Times Notable Book of 1999. Reading group guide available.

The Songs of the Kings

‘Pure gold…
. One of the best books by this most versatile of writers.’ Penelope Lively

‘Troy meant one thing only to the men gathered here, as it did to their commanders. Troy was a dream of wealth; and if the wind continued the dream would crumble.’ As the harsh wind holds the Greek fleet trapped in the straits at Aulis, frustration and political impotence turn into a desire for the blood of a young and innocent woman blood that will appease the gods and allow the troops to set sail. And when Iphigeneia, Agamemnon’s beloved daughter, is brought to the coast under false pretences, and when a knife is fashioned out of the finest and most precious of materials, it looks as if the ships will soon be on their way. But can a father really go to these lengths to secure political victory, and can a daughter willingly give up her life for the worldly ambitions of her father?

Throwing off the heroic values we expect of them, Barry Unsworth’s mythic characters embrace the political ethos of the twenty first century and speak in words we recognize as our own. The blowhard Odysseus warns the men to not ‘marginalize’ Agamemnon and to ‘strike while the bronze is hot.’ High sounding principles clash with private motives, and dark comedy ensues. Here is a novel that stands the world on its head.

The Ruby in Her Navel

‘Captivating, sensuous, and immensely moving…
. This is Barry Unsworth, the master of resonant historical fiction, on top form.’ Jim Crace Set in the Middle Ages during the brief yet glittering rule of the Norman kings, The Ruby in Her Navel is a tale in which the conflicts of the past portend the present. The novel opens in Palermo, in which Latin and Greek, Arab and Jew live together in precarious harmony. Thurstan Beauchamp, the Christian son of a Norman knight, works for Yusuf, a Muslim Arab, in the palace’s central finance office, a job which includes the management of blackmail and bribes, and the gathering of secret information for the king. But the peace and prosperity of the kingdom is being threatened, internally as well as externally. Known for his loyalty but divided between the ideals of chivalry and the harsh political realities of his tumultuous times, Thurstan is dispatched to uncover the conspiracies brewing against his king. During his journeys, he encounters the woman he loved as a youth; and the renewed promise of her love, as well as the mysterious presence of an itinerant dancing girl, sends him on a spiritual odyssey that forces him to question the nature of his ambition and the folly of uncritical reverence for authority. With the exquisite prose and masterful narrative drive that have earned him widespread acclaim, Barry Unsworth transports the reader to a distant past filled with deception and mystery, and whose racial, tribal, and religious tensions are still with us today. Reading group guide included.

Land of Marvels

Barry Unsworth, a writer with an almost magical capacity for literary time travel New York Times Book Review has the extraordinary ability to re create the past and make it relevant to contemporary readers. In Land of Marvels, a thriller set in 1914, he brings to life the schemes and double dealings of Western nations grappling for a foothold in Mesopotamia now Iraq in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Somerville, a British archaeologist, is excavating a long buried Assyrian palace. The site lies directly in the path of a new railroad to Baghdad, and he watches nervously as the construction progresses, threatening to destroy his discovery. The expedition party includes Somerville’s beautiful, bored wife, Edith; Patricia, a smart young graduate student; and Jehar, an Arab man of all duties whose subservient manner belies his intelligence and ambitions. Posing as an archaeologist, an American geologist from an oil company arrives one day and insinuates himself into the group. But he s not the only one working undercover to stake a claim on Iraq s rich oil fields. Historical fiction at its finest, Land of Marvels opens a window on the past and reveals its lasting impact.

Crete

‘His keen understanding of history and legend…
illuminate’s his visits.’ Publishers Weekly

‘A vivid picture of the island.’ Associated Press

‘It is hard to think of anywhere on earth where so many firsts and mosts are crammed into a space so small,’ Barry Unsworth writes of the isle of Crete. Birthplace of the Greek god Zeus, the Greek alphabet, and the first Greek laws, as well as the home of 15 mountain ranges and the longest gorge in Europe, this land is indisputably unique. And since ancient times, its inhabitants have maintained an astonishing tenacity and sense of national identity, even as they suffered conquest and occupation by Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Venetians, Ottoman Turks, and Germans.

Throughout this evocative book, now in trade paper, Unsworth describes the incredible physical and cultural proportions of the island in history, myth, and reality. Moving and artful, Crete gives readers a comprehensive picture and rich understanding of this complex and indeed, almost magical world of Mediterranean wonders.

With the same keen eye and clear, eloquent prose that distinguishes his acclaimed historical novels, Barry Unsworth delivers his readers a two fold traveler’s reward, at once a wonderfully detailed panorama of Crete‘s many layers of history and an evocative portrait of an island almost literally larger than life.