Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Richard Hughes was born in 1900 and educated at Charterhouse School and Oriel College, Oxford. A highly original and idiosyncratic writer, he wrote poems and plays as well as novels, but it is for these that he is best remembered, the most famous of which was his first, A High Wind in Jamaica, published in 1929. A remarkable man, he could number Masefield, Yeats, T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Augustus John and Dylan Thomas amongst his friends and acquaintances. Married to the painter Frances Bazley in 1932, he died in 1976."I had vague memories of a jolly tale of bungling pirates, which, as I listened aghast to this brilliant, deeply unsettling story, made me think that Hughes was spot on in his estimate of children's fatally unknowing view of the world" -- Christina Hardyment The Times "Richard Hughes shocked and enthralled with his first novel, a melodrama, by turns lyrical and brutal, about Victorian English children captured by pirates on their voyage home from colonial Jamaica" The Times "A children's adventure story, but of such brilliance and psychological astuteness that apparently, when it was published in 1929, it turned people away once and for all from sentimental Victorian versions of childhood" -- Esther Freud Sunday Times "A fascinating study in child psychology" New York Times "A hot draught of mad, primal fantasy and poetry" -- Rebecca West