Books by Barry Unsworth

As Simon Raikes immerses himself in the painstaking task of cleaning and repairing, he is inexorably drawn to the stories of violence and lust which have surrounded this stone virgin. A dangerous attraction develops between them and it appears inevitable that once again the stone virgin will bear witness to passion, betrayal and murder.

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.

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.

1914, and an English archaeologist called Somerville is fulfilling a lifelong dream: to direct an excavation in the desert of Mesopotamia. And Somerville, whose intention is purely to discover and preserve the land's ancient treasures finds his idealism sorely tested.

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 "e;denying Holy Writ"e; . . . 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