Sacred Hunger (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Barry Unsworth
- First Published: 1992
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The eighteenth century
- Setting: Great Britain, West Africa, and Florida
- Principal Characters: William Kemp, Matthew Paris, Erasmus Kemp, Captain Thurso, Delblanc, Sarah Wolpert
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: United States or Americans, Africa or Africans, Colonies or colonization, Abolitionists, Slavery or slaves, Eighteenth century, Greed, Sea or seafaring life, Great Britain, Shipbuilding, Mutiny
- Locales: Africa, Florida, Great Britain
Barry Unsworth’s novel Sacred Hunger, which shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, opens with the building of a ship, the Liverpool Merchant, in the Liverpool of 1752. The ship will be used to ply the so-called triangular trade, “cheap trade goods to Africa for the purchase of negroes, these then carried to America or the West Indies and sold there; rum and tobacco and sugar bought with the proceeds and resold in England.” There are these three rounds of profit to be made by the ship’s owner, William Kemp. Such is the...
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