Barry Unsworth

Sacred hunger

In fourteenth-century England a troupe of traveling players gathers information about a local murder and incorporates it into their play in hopes of drawing a larger audience

Morality Play

With the Greek fleet trapped in the straits of Aulis by storms, Iphigeneia, the innocent young daughter of Agamemnon, is brought to the coast under false pretenses in order to sacrifice her to appease the gods and allow the ships to continue their voyage to Troy, in a colorful historical novel about the Trojan War. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

The Songs of the Kings

In its romantic and dangerous tour of history, Barry Unsworth's Stone Virgin rivals A. S. Byatt's Possession.

Stone Virgin

It is the spring of 1767, two years after the events of Barry Unsworthâe(tm)s Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger. Erasmus Kemp, the son of a Liverpool slave ship owner, has had the rebellious sailors of his fatherâe(tm)s ship brought back to London to stand trial on charges of mutiny and piracy. However, Sullivan, the Irish fiddler, has escaped and is making his way on foot to the north of England, stealing and scamming as he goes. In London, Kemp is looking to invest some of his fortune on Britainâe(tm)s new industries: coal-mining and steel. When he receives a tip about some mines for sale in East Durham, Kemp sees the business opportunity he has been waiting for, and he too makes his way north, to the very same village that Sullivan is heading forâe¦

The Quality of Mercy

Crete (Directions)

1914, and an English archaeologist called Somerville is fulfilling a lifelong dream: to direct an excavation in the desert of Mesopotamia. Yet forces beyond his control threaten his work. The Great War is looming, and various interest groups are vying for control over the land and its many prizes.

novel

Land of marvels

1914, and an English archaeologist called Somerville is fulfilling a lifelong dream: to direct an excavation in the desert of Mesopotamia. Yet forces beyond his control threaten his work. The Great War is looming, and various interest groups are vying f

Land of Marvels

The Court of King Roger in Twelfth century Sicily simmers with the volatile passions of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Latins and Greeks. Among them, a young Norman called Thurstan Beauchamp finds employment under Yusuf, a Muslim who holds the Christian king's purse strings. But while Thurstan wishes to be made a Knight, he has little taste for courtly intrigues and instead divides his time between the divine - in the shape of childhood sweetheart Lady Alicia - and the delightful: the sensuous and exotic dancer Nesrin. However, in his pursuit of love and knighthood, Thurstan has yet to appreciate that he may also be a pawn in a far more deadly game . . .

The Ruby in Her Navel

In this thriller set in the Middle East of 1914, Somerville, a British archaeologist, and his team are excavating a long-buried Assyrian palace when an American geologist from an oil company posing as an archaeologist arrives one day and insinuates himsel

A Novel

An obsessed biographer of Lord Horatio Nelson lives a kooky existence, reenacting the military exploits of the hero in his basement, but knowledge of an act of brutality committed by the Royal Navy under his command threatens to derail his carefully constructed war game.

Losing Nelson

Renowned British novelist Unsworth documents his fascinating travels in Crete, largest of the Greek isles and home to the Minoan civilization of 1500 B.C.--one of the most glittering and sophisticated cultures the world has ever seen.

Crete

When the prim and proper head teacher, Rosemary Timmins, witnesses her retired neighbour's sudden collapse, she must inform the woman's husband - the formidable Major Scott Cooper. But his reaction to the news is certainly not what she expected...

A Place for Everything

Sent to uncover the conspiracies brewing against his king, Thurstan Beauchamp, a young Norman, finds intrigue, treachery, and love at the Sicilian court of King Roger in Palermo, and is torn between two different women--the widowed Lady Alicia, the woman he had loved as a youth, and Nesrin, a sensuous court dancer. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

A Novel of Love and Intrigue in the Twelfth Century

After encountering two old army buddies, Benson, a novelist suffering from writer's block, unleashes a plan that may backfire

Sugar and Rum

After Hannibal

Obsessively pursuing a bizarre underground life of darkness and spying, Simon sees innocent Josh as a threat to the labyrinth of tunnels he has built unde his sister Audrey's estate and takes steps to prevent their exposure.

The Hide

In the basement of his large anonymous North London house, Charles Cleasby painstakingly re-enacts the great sea battles of his hero, Horatio Nelson. He is also writing a faithful biography of the great man, as a true English hero for an age without idols, a 'bright angel' to Charles's dark shadow. But as Charles's visiting typist, Miss Lily, begins to question Nelson's heroism, and as Charles unearths evidence which tarnishes the image of his icon, his own precarious sense of identity is undermined and the battle raging inside him - between darkness and light, reality and fantasy - threatens to overwhelm him.

Thurstan, a young Norman and would-be Knight at the Court of King Roger in Palermo, has been in love since boyhood with Lady Alicia, now returned a widow from the Holy Land. Thurstan soon finds himself caught in a tangle of plots, counter-plots and deceptions that threaten to destroy him.

It is the spring of 1767, and the vengeful Erasmus Kemp has had the mutinous sailors of his father’s ship brought back to London to stand trial on piracy charges. Much to Kemp’s dismay, the Irish fiddler Sullivan has escaped, and retrieving him proves too much in the midst of overseeing the dramatic legal case and a new business venture in the northern coal and steel industries of Thorpe. But the two men’s paths are about to collide once again, for Sullivan is also on his way to Thorpe to fulfill the dying wish of his shipmate. With historical sweep and deep pathos, Unsworth explores the struggles of the downtrodden against the rich and the powerful.

Barry Unsworth

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