/lit/ - Literature

>A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

"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."

>http://www.mediafire.com/?yhk8lpm449nl99j

also my bad haiku summary on it from a thread I wish would've taken off:

Pirates kidnapping
Sociopathic children;
Sober tragedies.

Pirates kidnapping
Sociopathic children;
Sober tragedies.

A High Wind in Jamaica features pirates, but the adventure is very gloomy.

It's a very good book though.

I just finished A High Wind in Jamaica. It was amazing - about an English family living in Jamaica whose home is destroyed in a hurricane, so the parents send the children back to England. On the way, their ship is intercepted and the children are taken aboard a pirate ship.

Despite the adventure-y premise, it's actually a very unsettling book. Definitely not a children's book, though it is told through the perspective of the children involved. The completely uninterested detachment and the almost negligible moments of self-awareness combined sort of make the whole escapade seem surreal. Especially once they do make it back to England.

There were so many quotable phrases in this - those little bits of revealed universal experience that make me love reading in the first place. I wish I'd been marking them down somewhere, but you'll easily find some every few pages.

I picked up The Fox in the Attic by the same guy (Richard Hughes) to read sometime, but I feel like I probably just read his magnum opus. Because it was absolutely wonderful.