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Barry Unsworth returns to the ground of his Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Craving for food, this time pursuing Sullivan, the Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, kid of a Liverpool slave dispatch owner who hanged himself. It is the planting season of 1767, and to avenge his father's fatality, Erasmus Kemp has already established the rebellious sailors of his father's dispatch, including Sullivan, cut back to London to stand trial on charges of mutiny and piracy. But as the novel starts, a blithe Sullivan has escaped and is also making his way on foot to the north of England, stealing as he goes and sleeping where he can. His destination is Thorpe in the East Durham coalfields, where his deceased shipmate, Billy Blair, lived: He has pledged to tell the family how Billy achieved his end. With this town, Billy's sister, Nan, and her miner husband, Adam Bordon, live with their three sons, all destined to check out their daddy down the pit. The youngest, only seven, is enjoying his last summer aboveground. In the mean time, in London, a separate anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Ashton, gets involved with a second circumstance relating to the lost dispatch. Erasmus Kemp needs settlement for the cargo of tired slaves who were tossed overboard to drown, and Ashton is representing the insurance providers who dispute his state. Despite their polarized views on slavery, Ashton's beautiful sister, Jane, encounters Erasmus Kemp and detects herself powerfully attracted to him. Lord Spenton, who is the owner of coal mines in East-Durham, has luxurious habits and is also pressed for the money. When he pertains to the Kemp vendor bank for financing, Erasmus recognizes a home based business of the kind he has long been hoping for, a way of gaining access into Britain's rapidly expanding and highly profitable coal and metallic establishments. Thus he too makes his way north, to the same town that Sullivan is heading for.... With historical sweep and profound pathos, Unsworth explores the problems of the powerless and the captive contrary to the abundant and the powerful, and what weight mercy may chuck on the scales of justice.
