The Guyana Quartet

The Guyana Quartet

Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris

This epic masterpiece is a radical landmark in modern literature, reissued with a foreword by poet Ishion Hutchinson to mark Wilson Harris' centenary.'An exhilarating experience ... Genius.' Jamaica KincaidI dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...Guyana. An ancient landscape of rainforests and swamplands, haunted by the legacy of slavery and colonial conquest. It is the site of dangerous journeys through the Amazonian interior, where riverboat crews embark on spiritual quests and government surveys are sabotaged by indigenous uprisings. It is a universe of complex moralities, where the conspiracies of a sinister money-lender and the faked death of a murderer question innocence and inheritance. It is a place where life and death, myth and history, philosophy and metaphysics blur. And it is the birthplace of an epic masterpiece. Wilson Harris' The Guyana...
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Palace of the Peacock (Faber Editions)

Palace of the Peacock (Faber Editions)

Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris

The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew's dreamlike jungle voyage ...'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid'A masterpiece: I love this book for its language, adventure and wisdoms: how it reverences and unearths another time.' Monique Roffey'Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's work.' Jeet Thayil'The Guyanese William Blake . Such poetic intensity.' Angela CarterI dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a...
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The Tree of the Sun

The Tree of the Sun

Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris

The Tree of the Sun, first published in 1978, begins where Wilson Harris's previous novel Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness ended, and thus forms a sequel. The London-dwelling Brazilian painter Da Silva is deeply moved by his wife's pregnancy after eight years of marriage. As he contemplates the child to be born he recalls a painting he began on the very morning he and his wife made love and conception occurred: a painting that contained a growing image. This becomes the evolving 'foetus' of imagination through which Da Silva begins to relate himself and his wife to the former (childless) tenants of their Kensington flat. 'I must admire the imagination and force of Wilson Harris' writing.' Kevin Cully, Tribune
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Jonestown

Jonestown

Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris

'I was obsessed - let me confess - by cities and settlements in the Central and South Americas that are an enigma to many scholars. I dreamt of their abandonment, their bird-masks, their animal-masks ... Did their inhabitants rebel against the priests, did obscure holocausts occur, civil strife, famine, plague? Was Jonestown the latest manifestation...?' Jonestown (1996), one of Wilson Harris's most acclaimed creations, is a fictional re-imagining of the real-life ritual mass suicide orchestrated by Reverend Jim Jones in the remote Guyana forest in 1978. The novel's narrator, Francisco Bone, has survived the suicide albeit in a traumatized condition. By way of a dream-book he tries to heal his psychic wound, under the influence of the Mayan concept of time that twins past and future. Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost or neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and...
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The Carnival Trilogy

The Carnival Trilogy

Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris

This volume, introduced by the author, brings together three novels first published separately. 'The trilogy comprises Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990), novels linked by metaphors borrowed from theatre, traditional carnival itself and literary mythology. The characters make Odyssean voyages through time and space, witnessing and re-enacting the calamitous history of mankind, sometimes assuming sacrificial roles in an attempt to save modern civilisation from self-destruction.' Independent on Sunday 'The Four Banks of the River of Space is a kind of quantum Odyssey... in which the association of ideas is not logical but... a 'magical imponderable dreaming'. The dreamer is Anselm, another of Harris's alter egos, like Everyman Masters in Carnival and Robin Redbreast Glass in The Infinite Rehearsal... Together, they represent one of the most...
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