UNSWORTH, Barry ~ Sacred Hunger. Signed by the author.

FIRST UK PRINTING. Hamish Hamilton, London: 1992.

Large, thick 8vo., black publisher's boards, lettered and decorated with skeleton motif direct to spine; with matching decorative endpapers printed in grey and white; complete in the original unclipped brown, black and white printed dustwrapper (£14.99); THE BOOK near fine, perhaps a touch shaky due to the weight of the binding; a little pushed at spine ends; the odd spot to the edge of the text block THE WRAPPER fine. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First UK edition, first printing. This example signed by the author to the title page, with two Booker Prize ephemeral items loosely inserted (an unused sticker, and a full-sized bookmark). The joint Booker Prize-winning novel for 1992. 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, predominently 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: Fine