A High Wind in Jamaica

by Richard Hughes

Overview

A High Wind in Jamaica, first published as The Innocent Voyage in 1929, is a classic coming-of-age novel. The story centers on the five children of the Bas-Thornton family, living on a plantation in late nineteenth-century Jamaica. Following a devastating hurricane, their parents send the children to England aboard a merchant ship which is captured by pirates shortly after the ship sets sail. What follows is an intense, gripping story of children forced to deal with difficult situations and with emotions they are not yet equipped to handle. The book is considered to have set the stage for later novels such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and was the subject of a 1965 movie of the same name. Included in this edition is an Introduction by Isabel Paterson and four illustrations from the 1932 edition.

English author Richard Hughes (1900-1976), wrote novels, children's stories, plays, and poetry. A High Wind in Jamaica is his most famous work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798869059574
Publisher:	Nighthawk Books
Publication date:	12/15/2023
Pages:	168
Sales rank:	816,773
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.36(d)

About the Author

Richard Hughes (1900-1976) was born in Surrey, England, but his ancestors came from Wales and he considered himself a Welshman. After an early childhood marked by the deaths of two older siblings and his father (his mother then went to work as a magazine journalist), Hughes attended boarding school and, with every expectation of being sent to fight in the First World War, enrolled in the military. Armistice was declared, however, before he could see active service, and Hughes was free to go to Oxford, where he became a star on the university literary scene, with a book of poems in print and a play produced in the West End by the time he graduated in 1922. Hughes’s first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, came out in 1928 and was a best seller in the United Kingdom and America. In Hazard followed ten years later. Hughes also wrote stories for children and radio plays, but his final major undertaking was the “The Human Predicament”, an ambitious amalgamation of fact and fiction that would track the German and English branches of a single family into the disaster of the Second World War while offering a dramatic depiction of Hitler’s rise to power. The work was planned as a trilogy, but remained incomplete at the time of Hughes’s death. The first volume, The Fox in the Attic, appeared in 1960, to great critical acclaim; volume two, The Wooden Shepherdess, was published in 1973. All of Hughes’s completed novels are available from NYRB Classics.

Editorial Reviews

"This brilliant, gorgeously written, highly entertaining, and apparently light-hearted idyll quickly reveals its true nature as a powerful and profoundly disquieting meditation on the meaning of loyalty and betrayal, innocence and corruption, truth and deception." — Francine Prose, Elle

"During one snowy day, I read the whole book in one gulp. It was remarkable, tiny, crazy. I felt just like I did as a kid." — Andrew Sean Greer, All Things Considered, NPR 

“A surprisingly terrifying short novel about children kidnapped by pirates, elevated from its silliness by surprising moments of violence and introspection, as well as repeated flourishes of literary brilliance. Also, it’s funny.” —Emily Temple, Lit Hub, "20 Short Novels to Stay Up All Night Reading"

"A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight, only infinitely more delicious and macabre."

— Andrew Sean Greer, All Things Considered, NPR

“Cross a wacky seafaring adventure—Conrad gone awry via inept piracy—with an exploration of the consciousness of a child as radical and insightful as that provided by Henry James in What Maisie Knew, and you have A High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes....By turns funny, ironic, and brutally sad, this is a complex and astonishing novel."—Sue Miller, Barnes and Noble Review

From the Publisher