Books by Wilson Harris

Everyman Masters, sixty-five, begins a spiritual journey through the mysterious Caribbean carnival of masks.

The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew's dreamlike jungle voyage ...'My new all time favourite book ... A magnificent, breathtaking and terrifying novel.' Tsitsi Dangarembga'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid'A masterpiece: I love this book for its language, adventure and wisdoms.' Monique Roffey'Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's work.' Jeet Thayil'The Guyanese William Blake . Such poetic intensity.' Angela CarterI dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock ...A modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris' masterpiece has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers.'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' Guardian'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.' Observer'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' The Times'The most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar'Extraordinary ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.' Pauline Melville

The Sleepers of Roraima first published in Great Britain in 1970; The Age of the Rainmakers first published in 1971.

We know that life fades into death but, in what degree, does life re-live itself as it dreams of dying? The Ghost of memory is a novel about life and death or rather - to put it somewhat differently - about the close, almost indefinable cross-cultarlities between moments of life and death.

This volume, introduced by the author, brings together three novels first published separately. 'The trilogy comprises Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990), novels linked by metaphors borrowed from theatre, traditional carnival itself and literary mythology. The characters make Odyssean voyages through time and space, witnessing and re-enacting the calamitous history of mankind, sometimes assuming sacrificial roles in an attempt to save modern civilisation from self-destruction.' Independent on Sunday 'The Four Banks of the River of Space is a kind of quantum Odyssey... in which the association of ideas is not logical but... a 'magical imponderable dreaming'. The dreamer is Anselm, another of Harris's alter egos, like Everyman Masters in Carnival and Robin Redbreast Glass in The Infinite Rehearsal... Together, they represent one of the most remarkable fictional achievements in the modern canon.' Listener

'What [Wilson] Harris is doing is to extend the boundaries of our very conception of fiction.' Robert Nye. First published in 1982, The Angel at the Gate is offered to readers as Wilson Harris's analysis and interpretation of the 'automatic writing' of 'Mary Stella Holiday': an assumed name for the secretary and patient of the late Father Joseph Marsden. 'Mary suffered from a physical and nervous malaise as The Angel at the Gate makes clear. Through Marsden - the medical care he arranged for her and the sessions he provided in Angel Inn which gave scope to her 'automatic talents' - that illness became a catalyst of compassion through which she penetrated layers of social and psychical deprivation to create a remarkable fictional life for 'Stella' (apart from 'Mary') in order to unravel the thread that runs through a diversity of association in past and present 'fictional lives.'' (From Harris's introductory 'Note.')

The Tree of the Sun, first published in 1978, begins where Wilson Harris's previous novel Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness ended, and thus forms a sequel.The London-dwelling Brazilian painter Da Silva is deeply moved by his wife's pregnancy after eight years of marriage. As he contemplates the child to be born he recalls a painting he began on the very morning he and his wife made love and conception occurred: a painting that contained a growing image. This becomes the evolving 'foetus' of imagination through which Da Silva begins to relate himself and his wife to the former (childless) tenants of their Kensington flat. 'I must admire the imagination and force of Wilson Harris' writing.' Kevin Cully, Tribune

'He ascended, eyes riveted, nailed to the steps leading up to the top of the pyramid of the sun. How many human hearts he wondered had been plucked from bodies there to feed the dying light of the sun and create an obsession with royal sculptures, echoing stone?... It was time to take stock of others as hollow bodies and shelters into which one fell...'In Companions of the Day and Night (first published in 1975) Wilson Harris revives figures from his earlier Black Marsden - chiefly Clive Goodrich, the 'editor' of this text, who constructs a narrative from the papers of a figure known as Idiot Nameless: a wanderer between present and past, taking an Easter sojourn in Mexico that lasts both for days and for centuries. The results have the strangely hypnotic power characteristic of Wilson Harris's fiction.

In this 1967 novel Wilson Harris explores the spiritual and psychic realities beyond the mundane facts of relationships, boldly constructing his story on the basis of fragments.When the Forrestals died in an explosion that wrecked their home and destroyed most of its contents, there survived a disjointed diary - or 'log book', as Susan Forrestal called it. She had suffered from an affliction of the eyes which, after three operations, left her almost blind. Abandoned by her lover, who disappeared without a trace, she eventually married a kind and solicitous husband; nevertheless her lover continued to haunt her in such a way that his presence had an almost living reality.'I admire Wilson Harris's novels greatly; he is one of the very few living novelists whose works are too brief for my tastes.' Anthony Burgess

Wilson Harris's tenth novel, first published in 1972, is set in Edinburgh but, like much of his subsequent work, bridges continents by its imaginative reach.''Doctor Black Marsden', tramp, shaman, and conjurer, is an ambivalent Merlin-figure representing both the hero's personal (and archetypal) shadow, and the creative, magus-like activity of the author himself.' Michael Gilkes, Journal of Commonwealth Literature'... my many visits to Scotland, and books I have read, have given me the sensation of a tone or inner vibrancy that may be due to the languages (English, Scottish, Gaelic) that are present in the subconscious imagination of sensitive Scots... [These] make for the cross-culturality (not mono-cultural) that came into play in Black Marsden.' Wilson Harris, 2008

The first of these two novels is about a painter, Brazilian by birth and British by adoption, living and working in London with his wife, whose equally varied spiritual and cultural inheritance complements his.

Set like his first novel in The Guyana Quartet in the former colony of British Guiana, the second novel The Far Journey of Oudin is further proof of the intensity and originality of Wilson Harris's imaginative power and literary skill.

'I was obsessed - let me confess - by cities and settlements in the Central and South Americas that are an enigma to many scholars. I dreamt of their abandonment, their bird-masks, their animal-masks ... Did their inhabitants rebel against the priests, did obscure holocausts occur, civil strife, famine, plague? Was Jonestown the latest manifestation...?' Jonestown (1996), one of Wilson Harris's most acclaimed creations, is a fictional re-imagining of the real-life ritual mass suicide orchestrated by Reverend Jim Jones in the remote Guyana forest in 1978. The novel's narrator, Francisco Bone, has survived the suicide albeit in a traumatized condition. By way of a dream-book he tries to heal his psychic wound, under the influence of the Mayan concept of time that twins past and future. Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost or neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit www.faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see our blog, www.faberfindsblog.co.uk.

Set in British Guyana, the final two books (first published in 1962 and 1963) of "The Guyana Quartet" continue the author's literary exploration of the legacy and future of the former colony, which began with "The Palace of the Peacock".

Best known for his novels, Harris had written fiction and non-fiction since the 1960s. This provides the most comprehensive collection of his essays, interviews and lectures from the '60s to the present. Includes a bibliography of his work.