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.