In the press:
Ronald Merullo, LOS ANGELES TIMES:
“To Unsworth’s credit, though, he has not merely created a cardboard past and painted it with 20th-Century political correctness; he has given us a real, sweating, breathing, bleeding, complex world, a world in which blacks sell other blacks into slavery and whites flog and cheat each other to turn a profit, and a few heroic men and women of both races struggle toward justice against the prevailing social values and their own fears and doubts.”
http://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-08-02-bk-5886-story.html
“To Unsworth’s credit, though, he has not merely created a cardboard past and painted it with 20th-Century political correctness; he has given us a real, sweating, breathing, bleeding, complex world, a world in which blacks sell other blacks into slavery and whites flog and cheat each other to turn a profit, and a few heroic men and women of both races struggle toward justice against the prevailing social values and their own fears and doubts.”
http://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-08-02-bk-5886-story.html
Herbert Mitgang, THE NEW YORK TIMES:
“In ‘Sacred Hunger’, disease spreads, the crew mutinies, the captain goes to his just reward and the Liverpool Merchant ends up shipwrecked on the coast of Florida. There a secret community is formed by the doctor, the sailors and the slaves, living together in what is an uninhabited land only lightly under the domination of Spain…. Mr. Unsworth’s book… is a remarkable novel in every way.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/23/books/books-of-the-times-trading-in-misery-on-a-doomed-slave-ship.html
“In ‘Sacred Hunger’, disease spreads, the crew mutinies, the captain goes to his just reward and the Liverpool Merchant ends up shipwrecked on the coast of Florida. There a secret community is formed by the doctor, the sailors and the slaves, living together in what is an uninhabited land only lightly under the domination of Spain…. Mr. Unsworth’s book… is a remarkable novel in every way.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/23/books/books-of-the-times-trading-in-misery-on-a-doomed-slave-ship.html
Sam Jordison, THE GUARDIAN:
“…the most striking thing about the novel: the fact that it's a cracking adventure story. It isn't pleasant…but there are rewards. The story moves at a smart pace, the cast is huge and colourful, and there's enough detail to make us feel we are breathing in the salt air, the scent of the ship's timbers….”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jun/10/booker-club-sacred-hunger-barry-unsworth
“…the most striking thing about the novel: the fact that it's a cracking adventure story. It isn't pleasant…but there are rewards. The story moves at a smart pace, the cast is huge and colourful, and there's enough detail to make us feel we are breathing in the salt air, the scent of the ship's timbers….”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jun/10/booker-club-sacred-hunger-barry-unsworth
Penelope Lively, THE TIMES OF LONDON:
“Extraordinary skill… lavishly equipped, bearing witness to a time and a place, but apparently the product of some uncanny insight.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-jewel-and-the-crown-gg2lz7lmfjq
“Extraordinary skill… lavishly equipped, bearing witness to a time and a place, but apparently the product of some uncanny insight.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-jewel-and-the-crown-gg2lz7lmfjq
Robert A. Olwell, NOT EVEN PAST:
“In the character of Matthew Paris, Unsworth offers us an anachronism: an early-modern protagonist who acquires the post-modern insight that truth-making is itself a form of control and who becomes aware of his complicity in an oppressive system without having any intellectual, metaphysical, or religious beliefs upon which to build any alternative.”
https://notevenpast.org/sacred-hunger-1993/
“In the character of Matthew Paris, Unsworth offers us an anachronism: an early-modern protagonist who acquires the post-modern insight that truth-making is itself a form of control and who becomes aware of his complicity in an oppressive system without having any intellectual, metaphysical, or religious beliefs upon which to build any alternative.”
https://notevenpast.org/sacred-hunger-1993/
GOODREADS community reviews:
“Sacred Hunger is a stunning and engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed. Filled with the ‘sacred hunger’ to expand its empire and its profits, England entered full into the slave trade and spread the trade throughout its colonies.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239592.Sacred_Hunger
“Sacred Hunger is a stunning and engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed. Filled with the ‘sacred hunger’ to expand its empire and its profits, England entered full into the slave trade and spread the trade throughout its colonies.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239592.Sacred_Hunger