A High Wind in Jamaica

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. »

Francine Prose is the author of three collections of stories and ten novels. Her most recent novel, The Blue Angel, was nominated for the National Book Award. »

By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Francine Prose

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.

Read the introduction (PDF)

View the reading group guide (PDF)

Reviews

...[A High Wind in Jamaica] is a fascinating study in child psychology.
— New York Times

A High Wind in Jamaica...is a grand fantasy with a level of insight into the minds of children of the same magnitude on the literary Richter scale as Lord of the Flies, Peter Pan, and, to a lesser extent, The Chronicles of Narnia.
— Los Angeles Times

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

A hot draught of mad, primal fantasy and poetry.
— Rebecca West

There used to hang on the walls of country public houses and farm labourers' cottages a lithograph that, seen from close quarters, represented two innocent children against the light on a balcony beneath an arched window. When you receded from it you saw that in truth it showed as a skull, with crossbones complete beneath. Mr. Hughes book is that lithograph come to life in another art.
— Ford Madox Ford

Also see:

The Fox in the Attic
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Hilary Mantel

A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament."

The Wooden Shepherdess
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Hilary Mantel

This new edition of the The Wooden Shepherdess concludes with the twelve chapters that Hughes completed of the planned third volume of "The Human Predicament," here published for the first time in America.

In Hazard
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by John Crowley

The author of A High Wind in Jamaica is at his best on the high seas, where man's furious nature is matched—perhaps outpaced—by the intensity of the natural world. "A small masterpiece of lyric terror about a cargo ship that runs into a hurricane, but also about the rest of life." —Simon Schama

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.00
Price: $10.50 (25% off)

Sep 30, 1999
296 pages
ISBN: 0940322153
9780940322158
Literature in English
NYRB Classics

Find us on Facebook