Download or read book Sacred Hunger written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Booker Prize A historical novel set in the eighteenth century, Sacred Hunger is a stunning, engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed in the British Empire as it entered fully into the slave trade and spread it throughout its colonies. 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.
Download or read book Morality Play written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book In medieval England, a runaway scholar-priest named Nicholas Barber has joined a traveling theater troupe as they make their way toward their liege lord’s castle. In need of money, they decide to perform at a village en route. When their traditional morality plays fail to garner them an audience, they begin to stage the “the play of Thomas Wells”—their own depiction of the real-life drama unfolding within the village around the murder of a young boy. The villagers believe they have already identified the killer, and the troupe believes their play will be a straightforward depiction of justice served. But soon the players soon learn that the details of the crime are elusive, and the lines between performance and reality become blurred as they discover, scene by scene, line by line, what really happened. Thought-provoking and unforgettable, Morality Play is at once a masterful work of historical fiction, a gripping murder mystery, and a literary work of the first order.
Download or read book The Quality of Mercy written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barry 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 anti-slavery 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 . . . With historical sweep and deep pathos, Unsworth explores the struggles of the powerless and the captive against the rich and the powerful, and what weight mercy may throw on the scales of justice.
Download or read book The Songs of the Kings written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant retelling of an ancient myth, The Songs of the Kings offers up a different narrative of the Trojan War, one devoid of honor, wherein the mission to rescue Helen is a pretext for plundering Troy of its treasures. As the ships of the Greek fleet find themselves stalled in the straits at Aulis, waiting vainly for the gods to deliver more favorable winds, Odysseus cynically advances a call for the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter, Calchas the diviner interprets events for the reader, and a Homer-like figure called the Singer is persuaded to proclaim a tale of a just war to hide the corrupt motivations of those in power. But couched within the Singer’s spin is a message at once timely and timeless: “There is always another story. But it is the stories told by the strong, the songs of kings, that are believed in the end.”
Download or read book Pascali s Island written by Barry Unsworth and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1997 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Ruby in Her Navel written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In twelfth-century Norman Sicily, King Roger presides over Palermo in the aftermath of the Second Crusade. For the time being, Latins and Greeks, Arabs and Jews are living together in uneasy harmony. Within this milieu, young Thurstan Beauchamp serves faithfully as a civil servant of the king, his daily environment filled with tiny accountings, schemes, machinations, and bribes. When he is dispatched to investigate a conspiracy against the king, he will find his loyalties tested—and, when he encounters both his childhood sweetheart and a seductive dancer, his heart torn. An extraordinary tale of ambition, politics, and the loss of innocence, set against the glittering backdrop of medieval Europe, The Ruby in Her Navel powerfully traces the clash of civilizations from its historical origins, with deep resonances for today.
Download or read book The Ruby in Her Navel written by Barry Unsworth and published by . This book was released on 2014-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book After Hannibal written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Boy Book written by E. Lockhart and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2008-04-22 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From E. Lockhart, author of the highly acclaimed, New York Times bestseller We Were Liars, which John Green called "utterly unforgettable," comes The Boy Book, the second book in the uproarious and heartwarming Ruby Oliver novels. Here is how things stand at the beginning of newly-licensed driver Ruby Oliver's junior year at Tate Prep: • Kim: Not speaking. But far away in Tokyo. • Cricket: Not speaking. • Nora: Speaking--sort of. Chatted a couple times this summer when they bumped into each other outside of school--once shopping in the U District, and once in the Elliot Bay Bookstore. But she hadn't called Ruby, or anything. • Noel: Didn't care what anyone thinks. • Meghan: Didn't have any other friends. • Dr. Z: Speaking. • And Jackson. The big one. Not speaking. But, by Winter Break, a new job, an unlikely but satisfying friend combo, additional entries to The Boy Book and many difficult decisions help Ruby to see that there is, indeed, life outside the Tate Universe.
Download or read book Stone Virgin written by Barry Unsworth and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1995 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Simon Raikes restores a fifteenth-century Venetian masterpiece, he becomes obsessed with the sculpture, becoming involved in a crime as he reconstructs the past and is drawn into the mysteries of love, betrayal, and violence.
Download or read book Land of Marvels written by Barry Unsworth and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Ruby in Her Navel written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Tinkers written by Paul Harding and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Special edition of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel—featuring a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson and book club extras inside In this deluxe tenth anniversary edition, Marilynne Robinson introduces the beautiful novel Tinkers, which begins with an old man who lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past, where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. The story behind this New York Times bestselling debut novel—the first independently published Pulitzer Prize winner since A Confederacy of Dunces received the award nearly thirty years before—is as extraordinary as the elegant prose within it. Inspired by his family’s history, Paul Harding began writing Tinkers when his rock band broke up. Following numerous rejections from large publishers, Harding was about to shelve the manuscript when Bellevue Literary Press offered a contract. After being accepted by BLP, but before it was even published, the novel developed a following among independent booksellers from coast to coast. Readers and critics soon fell in love, and it went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize, prompting the New York Times to declare the novel’s remarkable success “the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory.” That story is still being written as readers across the country continue to discover this modern classic, which has now sold over half a million copies, proving once again that great literature has a thriving and passionate audience. Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: Enon and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tinkers. He teaches at Stony Brook Southampton.
Download or read book Ruby in Her Navel written by Barry Unsworth and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007-10-30 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the Middle Ages during the brief yet glittering rule of the Norman kings, this work is a tale in which the conflicts of the past portend the present. Unsworth transports the reader to a distant past filled with deception and mystery, and whose racial, tribal, and religious tensions are still present.
Download or read book Losing Nelson written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barry Unsworth’s Losing Nelson is a novel of obsession, the story of a man unable to see himself separately from the hero he mistakenly idolizes Admiral Lord Nelson. Charles Cleasby is, in fact, a Nelson biographer run amok. He is convinced that Nelson—Britain's greatest admiral, who finally defeated Napoleon, and lost his own life, in the Battle of Trafalgar—is the perfect hero, but in his research he has come upon an incident of horrifying brutality in Nelson's military career that simply stumps all attempts at glorification.
Download or read book The Idol Hunter written by Barry Unsworth and published by . This book was released on 2014-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Word Child written by Iris Murdoch and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guilt, secrets, and lies haunt two men whose lives are bound by a long-ago tragedy in this “riveting” novel by the author of The Sea, The Sea (Los Angeles Times). Twenty years ago, Hilary Burde’s story was one of remarkable success and enviable courage. Having brought himself out of a troubled childhood with only his intellect and wit, he was one of the most promising scholars at Oxford, a student with a rare talent for linguistics and an unquenchable drive. Until the accident. Now, forty-one and a decidedly ordinary failure, Hilary finds his quietly angry routine shattered when his old professor reappears in his life—a man whose own demons are tied to Hilary’s and the tragedy from years ago. As the two men begin to circle each other once again, digging up old wrongs and seeking forgiveness for long-buried ills, they find themselves on a path that will either grant them both redemption or destroy them both forever. Haunting and emotional, A Word Child is an intimate look at the madness of regret by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of Under the Net and A Severed Head.