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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
