Prize-winning Historical Novel

From The Guardian: Among the 2,000 UK adults surveyed, 85% were unaware that Britain forcibly transported more than 3 million Africans to the Caribbean, 89% did not know that Britain enslaved people in the Caribbean for more than 300 years, 63% support a formal apology to Caribbean nations and descendants of enslaved people – up 4% from 2024, and 40% support financial reparations, also reflecting a 4% increase from the previous year

Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth

This deadly serious novel won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1992. It is not only a historical novel about the 18th-century English slave trade - it is a work of moral excavation. It belongs to that rare class of fiction which attempts to examine the economic and ideological machinery of empire while also probing the psychological and spiritual costs exacted by its relentless operation.

Unsworth’s narrative, set against the backdrop of the triangular trade, is not content to merely dramatize the horrors of race-based chattel slavery. He is concerned with the broader implications: how the trade deformed the societies it touched, not only in West Africa, where it fomented internecine warfare and corrupted indigenous institutions, but also in England, where it infected the very language of commerce and law. The enslaved are not only victims of violence but of a system that rationalizes cruelty through euphemism and legalism.

The novel’s title is no accident. “Sacred hunger” refers not only to the literal hunger of the enslaved, but to the metaphysical hunger of the slavers - their greed, their need to justify their actions, their spiritual emptiness. Unsworth is at his most perceptive when he shows how this hunger is not confined to villains but is diffused across the social spectrum. The captain, the doctor, the investors - they are all implicated, all compromised.

There is a moment, early in the novel, when the captain and the ship’s doctor “touched glasses and drank, but it was the spirit of enmity they imbibed that afternoon, and both of them knew it.” This sentence is characteristic of Unsworth’s style: deceptively simple, yet freighted with irony and foreboding. He has a gift for the kind of prose that appears transparent but is in fact densely layered, drawing on both the rhythms of 18th-century English (Roderick Random) and the moral themes of the post-modern novel (Gravity’s Rainbow).

What distinguishes Sacred Hunger from the more conventional historical novel is its refusal to sentimentalize. The characters are not types but moral agents, often blind to their own motivations. The novel’s scope is epic, but its insights are intimate. Greed, obstinacy, despair - these are enduring elements of the human condition that are the fuel and exhaust of historical forces.

Unsworth’s achievement is to show how the slave trade a logical extension of a society built on profit, obedience and hierarchy. In this sense, Sacred Hunger is not only a novel about the 18th century - it is a novel about us.