A High Wind in Jamaica, a book that anticipated Lord of the Flies. It's the perfect intellectual seafaring adventure. A High Wind in Jamaica (Alexander Mackendrick, 1965, PG, Eureka) Philip French. Emily Temple, Lit Hub, '20 Short Novels to Stay Up All Night Reading'Ī High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight, only infinitely more delicious and macabre.ĭeeply bizarre and sometimes hilarious.particularly diverting is the sly narrative voice, which keeps darting around and sneaking up on you.

Andrew Sean Greer, All Things Considered, NPRĪ surprisingly terrifying short novel about children kidnapped by pirates, elevated from its silliness by surprising moments of violence and introspection, as well as repeated flourishes of literary brilliance. First titled The Innocent Voyage, it concerns a young girl named Emily Bas-Thornton. High Wind in Jamaica was first published in 1929 as The Innocent Voyage. 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.ĭuring one snowy day, I read the whole book in one gulp. A High Wind in Jamaica is a 1929 novel by Welsh author Richard Hughes. By turns funny, ironic, and brutally sad, this is a complex and astonishing novel.

Cross a wacky seafaring adventure-Conrad gone awry via inept piracy-with an exploration of the consciousness of a child as radical and insightful as that provided by Henry James in What Maisie Knew, and you have A High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes.

A high wind in jamaica book review