Author(s): Wilson Harris; Ishion Hutchinson

Novel | South and Central America

This dreamlike masterpiece is a radical landmark in modern literature, reissued with a foreword by poet Ishion Hutchinson to mark Wilson Harris' centenary.

I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...

British Guiana. An ancient landscape of rainforests and swamplands; a colony haunted by the enduring legacies of slavery and murder.

A riverboat crew led charts a quest seeking indigenous peoples to exploit as plantation labour; but their journey becomes a spiritual voyage towards the Palace of the Peacock ...

A genius money-lender, illegitimate child, and beggar become entangled in a strange drama that illuminates how slavery's descendants struggle to achieve true freedom ...

A man accused of a murder he didn't commit is on the run in the jungle swamplands; but as his innocence is disputed, he stages his death, entering a hallucinatory otherworld ...

A government surveyour captaining a boat crew encounters an elderly local man who accuses him of unfair dealings and threatens rebellion, building to a nightmarish climax ...

Reissued as a new omnibus with a foreword by Ishion Hutchinson to mark Sir Wilson Harris' centenary,The Guyana Quartet -The Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder -is a dazzling, mythic, epic masterpiece, as revolutionary today as it was over half a century ago.

'An exhilarating experience ... Genius.' - Jamaica Kincaid

I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...

Guyana. An ancient landscape of rainforests and swamplands, haunted by the legacy of slavery and colonial conquest. It is the site of dangerous journeys through the Amazonian interior, where riverboat crews embark on spiritual quests and government surveys are sabotaged by indigenous uprisings. It is a universe of complex moralities, where the conspiracies of a sinister money-lender and the faked death of a murderer question innocence and inheritance. It is a place where life and death, myth and history, philosophy and metaphysics blur. And it is the birthplace of an epic masterpiece.

Wilson Harris' The Guyana Quartet consists of four incandescent novels: Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder. It is a landmark of twentieth-century literature, as revolutionary today as it was over half a century ago.

'The Guyanese William Blake ... [Such] poetic intensity.' - Angela Carter

'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' - Guardian

'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.' - Observer

'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

'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' - The Times

Review: Perhaps the most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean. -- Fred D'Aguiar

Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous. -- Observer

Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying. -- Times

An extraordinary writer ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues. -- Pauline Melville

Author Biography: 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.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among other awards. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

This epic masterpiece is a radical landmark in modern literature, reissued with a foreword by poet Ishion Hutchinson to mark Wilson Harris' centenary.