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Shop nowPalace of the Peacock (Faber Editions)
'Magnificent' - Tsitsi Dangarembga
Narrator
Don Warrington
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Length
3 hours 48 minutes
Language
English
A radical landmark in Caribbean literature, reissued with a new foreword by Jamaica Kincaid to mark Wilson Harris' centenary: this visionary masterpiece tracing the dreamlike voyage of a riverboat crew through the jungle defies definition sixty years on.
I 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. Donne, their wild, domineering leader is 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 blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock ...
A modernist fever dream; hallucinatory prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris' visionary masterpiece has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers.
'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid
'The Guyanese William Blake . [Such] poetic intensity.' Angela Carter
'Staggering ... Brilliant and terrifying.' The Times
'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.' Observer
'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' Guardian
'Perhaps the most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar
'An extraordinary writer ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.' Pauline Melville
Sir Wilson Harris was a prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and lecturer. Born in 1921 in British Guiana, his father died when he was two and his stepfather disappeared into the rainforests in 1929. He began working as a government surveyor in 1942 and led expeditions into the Amazonian interior for almost 15 years. In 1959 he left for England to become a full-time writer. The following year, Faber published his debut novel, Palace of the Peacock, which became a landmark of Caribbean literature and the first of The Guyana Quartet. Over the course of his career, Faber published all 26 of Harris' novels, including The Carnival Trilogy, Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar, and The Ghost of Memory. Harris was awarded numerous academic fellowships and honorary doctorates as well as being a Guggenheim Fellow. He twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature as well as a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Harris was knighted in 2010, and died in 2018 at the age of 96.