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