Richard Hughes

Tervetuloa Pohjoismaiden suurimpaan verkkokirjakauppaan! Adlibris kannattaa sananvapautta, ja haluamme edistää kirjallisuuden ja tiedon saatavuutta.

Tervetuloa Pohjoismaiden suurimpaan verkkokirjakauppaan! Adlibris kannattaa sananvapautta, ja haluamme edistää kirjallisuuden ja tiedon saatavuutta.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes is set against the lush, volatile backdrop of 19th-century Jamaica. A High Wind in Jamaica is a haunting, darkly humorous exploration of innocence, imagination, and the eerie unpredictability of childhood. When a hurricane devastates their plantation home, the Bas-Thornton children are sent to England for safety. But fate has other plans: their ship is overtaken by pirates, and what follows is a surreal, unforgettable voyage through lawless waters and even murkier moral depths. Unlike any "children's adventure" before it, this novel shatters romantic illusions of piracy and youth. Hughes writes children not as sweet caricatures, but as mysterious, instinct-driven creatures-capable of joy, cruelty, wonder, and indifference in equal measure. Originally published in 1929 and praised by the likes of William Golding and Graham Greene, A High Wind in Jamaica is at once a savage satire and a chilling psychological odyssey. It's a literary classic that continues to provoke, disturb, and mesmerize readers nearly a century later.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes is set against the lush, volatile backdrop of 19th-century Jamaica. A High Wind in Jamaica is a haunting, darkly humorous exploration of innocence, imagination, and the eerie unpredictability of childhood. When a hurricane devastates their plantation home, the Bas-Thornton children are sent to England for safety. But fate has other plans: their ship is overtaken by pirates, and what follows is a surreal, unforgettable voyage through lawless waters and even murkier moral depths. Unlike any "children's adventure" before it, this novel shatters romantic illusions of piracy and youth. Hughes writes children not as sweet caricatures, but as mysterious, instinct-driven creatures-capable of joy, cruelty, wonder, and indifference in equal measure. Originally published in 1929 and praised by the likes of William Golding and Graham Greene, A High Wind in Jamaica is at once a savage satire and a chilling psychological odyssey. It's a literary classic that continues to provoke, disturb, and mesmerize readers nearly a century later.

The idea for the novel came in 1925, when a family friend introduced Hughes to an unpublished manuscript by one Jeanette Calder. This was a record of her personal experiences in 1822, off the coast of Cuba, as one of a group of children on a brig captured by pirates. Hughes was struck by the fact that the pirates, despite holding the children as hostages in an attempt to extort money from the ship's captain, treated them with kindness and consideration. To research the historical background, he read as widely as he could on Caribbean piracy in the nineteenth century. He was also able to draw on his mother's experience of growing up in Jamaica; at this time, Hughes himself had never been there. Finally, having no children himself, he 'borrowed' other people's in order to study child psychology: these included Charlotte Williams-Ellis (daughter of Hughes' friend and editor, the writer Amabel Williams-Ellis. The Author was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was Arthur Hughes, a civil servant, and his mother, Louisa Grace Warren, had been brought up in the West Indies in Jamaica. He was educated first at Charterhouse School and graduated from Oriel College, Oxford in 1922.