As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.

Sacred Hunger (1992) centres on the Atlantic slave trade that moves from Liverpool to West Africa Florida and the West Indies. It was adapted as a film The Reckoning (2003) starring Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe. – with sufficient subtlety and accuracy.

He publiBarry Unsworthd 17 novels and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger.