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.
- ISBN10 0940322153
- ISBN13 9780940322158
- Publish Date 30 September 1999 (first published December 1960)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher The New York Review of Books, Inc
- Imprint NYRB Classics
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 296
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780940322158