Sacred Hunger
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1752, the Liverpool Merchant sets sail from Merseydale. A slaver, she is bound for Africa to buy men and transport them in chains across the Atlantic. But aboard the ship disease thrives in the cramped hold, killing men and eating into profit. Captain Thruso insists on throwing the sick overboard - the
… More »1752, the Liverpool Merchant sets sail from Merseydale. A slaver, she is bound for Africa to buy men and transport them in chains across the Atlantic. But aboard the ship disease thrives in the cramped hold, killing men and eating into profit. Captain Thruso insists on throwing the sick overboard - the the horror of Matthew Paris, ship's surgeon, who determines to prevent such barbarity. Meanwhile, back home, Erasmus Kemp, cousin of Paris and son of the Liverpool Merchant's owner, finds his fortune hanging in the balance: depending on the success or failure of a single voyage. . .Winner of the Booker Prize 1992.
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Add a CommentThis Booker winning novel, set in Liverpool in 1752, is about the slave trade. It is about greed offset by hope.
I was utterly enthralled by this book initially; I was enamored of the language and deeply invested in the story about the people aboard a slave ship in the 1700s. Alas, at some point after the middle of the book, the author lost me. He skipped ahead in time when I was so invested in the time in which he had put me. The reliance in the later chapters on pidgin English was wearisome and offensive. The famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, was born a slave but his English was grammatically correct and as elegant as it was powerful. The idea that the white men and the Africans could only communicate by all sides using pidgin English was irritating, demeaning and distracting. I wish the author had done it differently because before that the book had me by the heart.