Sugar and Rum

by Barry Unsworth (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1990

  $4.44

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $7.36

  Unable to work on his novel about Liverpool's slave trade, Benson is teaching creative writing and wandering the city. The pupils who bring him their fantasies are a sad, dispossessed group with varying degrees of literary talent. Caught up in a series of bizarre events, Benson nevertheless finds his own imagination sparked by an encounter with two old army colleagues: Thompson, down-and-out and homeless; and Slater, a fabulously wealthy entrepreneur. In trying to heal old wounds, Benson unleashes a plan that just may blow up in his face. There is a violent resolution to this obsessive and provocative novel that examines the abscesses and abysses beneath the violence of urban life and offers a quixotic personal answer. - The Times [London] Fine descriptive writing and spirited humanity. - The Guardian Published for the first time in the United States Booker Prize-winning author of Sacred Hunger

• Used

  Hardcover
  1988

  $3.49

  Benson is a 63-year-old writer who is losing command of his former skill, and directs his literary efforts towards a group of disparate lonely people to whom he teaches creative writing. He meets up with an old war comrade, a down-and-out victim of Thatcher's Britain, and things change. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Barry Unsworth is the author of many novels including Mooncranker's Gift , Stone Virgin and Pascali's Island , which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980.