Barry Unsworth evokes a distant past filled with deception and mystery, whose racial, tribal, and religious tensions are still with us today
Morality Play
Written by Barry Unsworth
- Shortlisted
- The Booker Prize 1995
- Published by Hamish Hamilton
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Barry Unsworth’s detective story set in the 14th century, a time of calamity such as few others have been, marked by war, plague and fear of hellfire
Nicholas Barber, a footloose young cleric, has left his diocese without his Bishop’s leave. He has sung in taverns, he has gambled away his holy relics, he has committed adultery. Now, to compound his sins, he has joined a troupe of travelling players, a thing expressly forbidden to members of the clergy. Trouble enough, but nothing compared to what happens when the company decides to enact the murder of the young boy called Thomas Wells.
Barry Unsworth
Barry Unsworth was born in London. He published 17 novels, and is best known for his historical fiction
More about Barry Unsworth Other nominated books by Barry Unsworth
Barry Unsworth’s gripping historical novel about the Atlantic slave trade shared the Booker Prize 1992 with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient
Barry Unsworth’s complex study of betrayal, paranoia, deception and fear, delivered by Pascali himself – an altogether untrustworthy narrator