When I had the opportunity to read Barry Unsworth's "Sacred Hunger," I jumped at the chance, and not because this author won the Booker Prize. I didn't know a thing about him, had never heard of him, and couldn't have cared if he had won any prize related to writing. All I knew was that I could receive credit for a directed readings class at my university for reading the novel. The topic I was working on at the time concerned...
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Make no mistake about it, reading Sacred Hunger is a significant undertaking -- both in terms of the impact this complex and epic story will have on you and because of the time and concentration it will take to navigate the book's more than 600 pages. That significance is something to savor.I will avoid the cliché of saying that the story "has it all," but Sacred Hunger does come close to that. There's the adventure of a band...
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This is one of the most painful books I have ever read, and my action of mailing copies to my closest friends is both an action of great friendship and great sadism. This story of the slave-trade and a new society formed after one slave-ship escapes -- through sickness, mutiny, opportunity -- pains as much as it pleases. Characters we live with and love are hunted down by characters who see them only as animals. We...
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Barry Unsworth's novel Sacred Hunger is an exquisitely crafted tale of commerce and corruption set in 18th century England, at the heart of which lies the tension between the moral characters of two cousins. Erasmus Kemp is the intense, arrogant son of a slave ship owner, who holds the prevailing opinion of the day that the lawful accumulation of wealth is the only way a man should live his life. Mathew Paris is the...
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I read this book about three years ago, and some of the passages are still etched vividly in my mind. The writing in amazingly lush. As some reviewers have already pointed out, there is a great deal of detail in some of the passages which, in lesser hands, could be terribly boring (Like in Millhauser's "Martin Dressler"). But here, they are magical. This is one of the few books where I would actually stop periodically...
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