Sugar and Rum

A change of pace for today’s summer reading. Barry Unsworth wrote this novel - about a novelist with writer’s block - when he had writer’s block himself working on his novel Sacred Hunger about the slave trade in Liverpool. Eventually, he successfully completed that novel, which jointly won the 1992 Booker prize with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Sugar and Rum is set in Liverpool in 1988, and depicts poverty and deprivation there during the ‘Thatcher’ years. Hard not to make comparisons with the situation there today, especially after this week’s tragic incidents.