Booker Prize Winning Title

Unsworth, Barry ~ Sacred Hunger : Signed By the Author With A Loose ‘Joint Winner Booker Prize 1992’ Sticker and A ‘Booker Prize Shortlist’ Bookmark

Hamish Hamilton

The First UK Printing published by Hamish Hamilton in 1992. The BOOK is in near Fine condition. A tight copy free from inscriptions and erasures. A little age toning to the text block but the pages remain clean. The WRAPPER is complete and is in near Fine condition. It bears the correct price of £14.99. No fading of colouring to the spine with just a little rubbing and creasing at the spine ends. The wrapper design looks very striking in the removable Brodart archival cover. The book has been Signed by the Author to the title page. Accompanied by a loose 'Joint Winner Booker Prize 1992' Sticker (which has not been applied and remains on its original backing and a 'Booker Prize Shortlist' Bookmark which is in fine condition. The joint Winner of the 1992 Booker Prize. Barry Unsworth was an English writer of Historical Fiction. Born in Wingate, County Durham, to a family of miners, he studied at Manchester University before travelling extensively throughout Europe, predominantly through Greece and Turkey, and it was these experiences which inspired his early novels. Unsworth had already written nine novels, one of which had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980, when 'Sacred Hunger' was published. Set in 1752 on board the slave ship the 'Liverpool Merchant', the plot combines the tangled fortunes of two cousins with the true horrors of the slave trade. Over six hundred pages long, the book was not only a historical narrative focusing on greed, corruption and the extent of human cruelty but, as the author himself claimed in a 1992 interview, a comment on the society in which he grew up, where these characteristics were still evident: "It was impossible to live in the Eighties without being affected by the sanctification of greed", he said, "My image of the slave ship was based on the desire to find the perfect symbol for that entrepreneurial spirit. The arguments used to justify it are the same used now to justify the closure of these pits and throwing out of work of all these miners. I used the term 'wealth creation' deliberately. I knew it was anachronistic." A sequel, 'The Quality of Mercy', was published in 2011: it was his last book. He also wrote a second work on a similar subject, 'Sugar and Rum', which was published in 1988, and is a further examination of the Liverpool slave trade, with a protagonist who, like Unsworth at the time, was suffering from writer's block. Unsworth went on to appear in the Booker Prize listings twice more; in the shortlist for 'Morality Play' (1995) and in the longlist for 'The Ruby in Her Navel' in 2005. Scarce signed.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Near Fine