In 1914, 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 - Turkish, German, English and American - are vying for control over the land and its strategic and economic prizes. The Germans are securing trade routes with a new railway; a major in the Royal Engineers is working undercover, secretly mapping for the British the areas rich in oil; the Bedouin Jehar takes what he can from his new paymasters. The greatest idealist is Somerville, whose intention is to discover and preserve the land's ancient treasures. As he weaves these stories together in a powerful narrative, Unsworth provides a brilliant commentary on imperial ambition in the Middle East, and an acute historical perspective on the land that became modern Iraq.

Land of Marvels

UNSWORTH, Barry

Hutchinson

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

WINDMILL

The Quality of Mercy opens in the spring of 1767, in the immediate aftermath of the events in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. It follows the fortunes of two central characters from that book: Sullivan, an Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, the son of a disgraced Liverpool slave-ship owner who hanged himself. To avenge his father's death, Erasmus Kemp has had the rebellious sailors of his father's ship, including Sullivan, brought back to London to stand trial on charges of mutiny and piracy. But as the novel opens, a blithe Sullivan has escaped and is making his way on foot to the north of England, stealing and scamming as he goes. His destination is the colliery village where his dead shipmate, Billy Blair, lived: he has pledged to tell the family how Billy met his end. In this village, Thorpe in the East Durham coalfields, live Billy's sister Nan and her miner husband, James Bordon. Their three sons are all destined to follow their father down the pit. The youngest, only 7, is enjoying his last summer above ground. The terrible conditions in which mineworkers laboured are vividly evoked, and Bordon has dreams of escaping the mine with his family. Meanwhile in London a passionate anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Ashton, gets involved in a second case relating to the lost ship. Erasmus Kemp is claiming financial compensation for the cargo of sick slaves who were thrown overboard to drown, and Ashton is representing the insurers who dispute his claim. Ashton triumphs in court, but not before his beautiful sister, Jane, has encountered Erasmus Kemp and found herself powerfully attracted to him despite their polarised views on slavery. She discovers that Kemp wants to spend some of his sugar and slavery fortune on Britain's new industries: coal-mining and steel. A landowner father of a friend of Jane's tips him off about Lord Spenton's mines, for sale in East Durham, and Kemp sees the business opportunity he has been waiting for. Thus he too makes his way north, to the very same village that Sullivan is heading for ...

The Quality of Mercy

Contemporary

As the child of an absent mother and a disapproving father, Charles Cleasby found comfort in solitary games of chess. Many years later, in the house where he grew up and now lives alone, he re-enacts the naval battles of his hero Horatio Nelson, moving model ships as carefully as he once did chess pieces. Having long been convinced of a link between 'this great man's life and mine', Charles, surrounded by his collection of Nelson memorabilia, begins work on his biography of the Admiral and is unsettled to find that Nelson may not be the perfect leader he's always imagined. To doubt his hero's integrity feels like a terrible betrayal, but if Nelson is not the man Charles thought he was, what does that mean for him?

Losing Nelson

Passionate, erotic and haunting, this is a brilliant novel by one of Britain's most important novelists. When conservationist Simon Raikes goes to Venice to restore a statue of the Madonna, he is unprepared for the effect this stone virgin's strange, seductive beauty and mysterious past will have on his life. As he gradually peels away the layers of dirt from the statue, he becomes increasingly haunted by its potent history of sexual passion, greed, treachery and murder. Modelled on a beautiful prostitute in fifteenth-century Venice, its sculptor paid with his life when he fell in love with her. Then, in the eighteenth-century, a lecherous nobleman consummated an illicit affair beneath the statue, recalled in salacious detail in his memoirs. As Simon becomes caught in the heady sexual spell of the Madonna's story, he is also increasingly attracted to an enigmatic Italian woman, Chiara, the wife of a sculptor, and realises that the stone virgin's violent and erotic past is once again invading the present.

The Stone Virgin

Mooncranker's Gift

Penguin

Passionate, erotic and haunting, this is a brilliant novel by one of Britain's most important novelists. Simon Rakes - a conservation expert - is restoring the Stone Virgin, a statue that cost the life of its creator in the 14th century. The statue is of great beauty but its past is soaked with a history of violence, sexual passion and human greed. As Simon's work continues and he meets Chiara, the enigmatic and beautiful wife of another sculptor, the past spills uncontrollably into the present.

Stone Virgin

Penguin Uk

A Turkish spy for twenty years, Basil Pascali is puzzled by the arrival of a mysterious Englishman posing as an archaeologist.

Pascalis Island

A Turkish spy for twenty years, Basil Pascali is puzzled by the arrival of a mysterious Englishman posing as an archaeologist

Pascali's Island: Movie Tie-In of The Idol Hunter

Penguin??Books

Sacred Hunger

WINNER OF THE 1992 BOOKER PRIZE 'Gripping . . . SACRED HUNGER covers a period between 1752 and 1765 . . . it concerns the entangled and conflicted fortunes of two cousins: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a Lancashire merchant, and Matthew Paris, a scholar and surgeon just released from prison for "denying Holy Writ" . . . the Liverpool Merchant is the vessel on which the whole of the novel hinges, and it carries the reader deep into the history of man's iniquitous greed . . . AS REGARDS ITS DRAMATIC BREADTH AND ENERGY, NO RECENT DOMESTIC NOVEL HAS COME WITHIN A MILE OF IT' - Anthony Quinn in the Independent

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by UNSWORTH, Barry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by UNSWORTH, Barry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by UNSWORTH, Barry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Land of Marvels

Land of Marvels

The Quality of Mercy

Losing Nelson

The Stone Virgin

Mooncranker's Gift

Stone Virgin

Pascalis Island

Pascali's Island: Movie Tie-In of The Idol Hunter

Sacred Hunger