August meetup - A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

For new attendees: Please text me at 469-449-7023 to be added to the WhatsApp group chat where we vote on future selections, find each other during meetups, etc.

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.

1929. 279 pages.

The swift, almost hallucinatory action of Hughes's novel, together with its provocative insight into the psychology of children, made it a best seller when it was first published in 1929 and has since established it as a classic of twentieth-century literature -- an unequaled exploration of the nature, and limits, of innocence.
The novel has since been described as "one of the classic novels of childhood and a completely original work." It is often given credit for influencing and paving the way for novels such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Free PDF: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.201337
Free text: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75530

Free Audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PB8jcG7j4A

Note: For ambitious readers, the optional bonus book selection this month is the novella The Typhoon by Joseph Conrad.

Free text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1142/1142-h/1142-h.htm