A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes - 1929

VERY GOOD — DUST JACKET: Minor wear to top and bottom edges of spine, panels, flaps and folds. BOARDS: Very minor soiling/spots to front and back, primarily front BOOK: Nice topstain. Small stain to textblock head. Minor foxing to foredge. Minor offsetting to endpapers. Minor foxing to outside margins, half-title page thru page 1. Hinge peeking, reverse of copyright page. Please inspect photos closely for condition details.

Here on offer is a very nice copy of Richard Hughes' most famous novel - a collectable gem - A High Wind in Jamaica. It is the tale of a group of English schoolchildren captured by pirates on the high seas and the dark drama that soon unfolds. This copy is a 1st UK trade edition, 1st printing of the work published by Chatto & Windus in 1929. The dust jacket is protected from further wear by a Mylar sleeve.

*********************************************************

"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."

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE (19 April 1900 – 28 April 1976) was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays.

He was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was Arthur Hughes, a civil servant, and his mother Louisa Grace Warren who 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. . . .

He was the author of the world's first radio play, A Comedy Of Danger, commissioned from him for the BBC by Nigel Playfair and broadcast on 15 January 1924. . . .

He wrote only four novels, the most famous of which is The Innocent Voyage (1929), or A High Wind in Jamaica, as Hughes renamed it soon after its initial publication. Set in the 19th century, it explores the events which follow the accidental capture of a group of English children by pirates: the children are revealed as considerably more amoral than the pirates (it was in this novel that Hughes first described the cocktail Hangman's Blood). . . .

In 1998, A High Wind in Jamaica was included as number 71 in the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, a list of the best English-language novels of the 20th century. . . .

The above text was taken from, respectively, Penguin publishing (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.