Barry Unsworth evokes a distant past filled with deception and mystery, whose racial, tribal, and religious tensions are still with us today
Pascali's Island
Written by Barry Unsworth
- Shortlisted
- The Booker Prize 1980
- Published by Michael Joseph
Buy the book
Barry Unsworth’s complex study of betrayal, paranoia, deception and fear, delivered by Pascali himself – an altogether untrustworthy narrator
It is the summer of 1908, and a Greek island off the coast of Asia Minor is one small particle of the vast, decaying Ottoman Empire. On the island, a Levantine informer in the pay of the Ottoman authorities, Pascali, has for 20 years been sending in his reports to Constantinople - reports never acknowledged, never acted upon. Now he fears that the Greeks on the island have discovered what he is, and his days are numbered…
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 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
Barry Unsworth’s gripping historical novel about the Atlantic slave trade shared the Booker Prize 1992 with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient
Features
- Book recommendations