'That very rare thing, a top-notch historical novel...Unsworth's theme is human rivalry; his subject is the slave trade of the mid eighteenth century...Sacred Hunger is a tremendous performance' - D.J. Taylor, Sunday Times '[A] gripping yarn...Sacred Hunger covers a period between 1752 and 1765. It concerns the entangled and conflicting fortunes of two cousins: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a Lanc ashire merchant, and Matthew Paris, a scholar and surgeon j ust released from prison...the Liverpool Merchant is the vessel on which the whole of the novel hinges, and it carries the reader deep into the hisory of man's iniquitous greed... no recent domestic novel has come within a mile of it' - Anthony Quinn, Independent