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3.5 

A High Wind in Jamaica

By Richard Hughes & Francine Prose
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes & Francine Prose digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Richard Hughes's celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.

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41 Reviews

3.5
Characters change and growDiverse charactersMulti-layered charactersOriginal writingUnpredictableDark settingComing of ageDarkThought-provoking
Surprised Face with Open Mouth
Beautifully writtenOriginal writingImmersive settingRacismViolence
“Written in 1929 and originally titled "The Innocent Voyage," Hughes' novel about a small group of children whose boat from Jamaica to England is kidnapped by pirates reminded me of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" in its portrayal of the children's amorality, manipulation, and violence. The novel is disturbing in its portrayal of the sexuality of your girls and in its eventual miscarriage of justice. Much of the detail seems barely tangential to the plot, and many plot threads are left dangling. Furthermore, while many of the portraits of the children and the pirates are well done, I never quite connected with the characters or cared about their fates.”

About Richard Hughes

Richard Hughes (1900-1976) was born in Surrey, England, but his ancestors came from Wales and he considered himself a Welshman. After an early childhood marked by the deaths of two older siblings and his father (his mother then went to work as a magazine journalist), Hughes attended boarding school and, with every expectation of being sent to fight in the First World War, enrolled in the military. Armistice was declared, however, before he could see active service, and Hughes was free to go to Oxford, where he became a star on the university literary scene, with a book of poems in print and a play produced in the West End by the time he graduated in 1922. Hughes’s first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, came out in 1928 and was a best seller in the United Kingdom and America. In Hazard followed ten years later. Hughes also wrote stories for children and radio plays, but his final major undertaking was the “The Human Predicament”, an ambitious amalgamation of fact and fiction that would track the German and English branches of a single family into the disaster of the Second World War while offering a dramatic depiction of Hitler’s rise to power. The work was planned as a trilogy, but remained incomplete at the time of Hughes’s death. The first volume, The Fox in the Attic, appeared in 1960, to great critical acclaim; volume two, The Wooden Shepherdess, was published in 1973. All of Hughes’s completed novels are available from NYRB Classics.

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