From the back cover:
"Gripping... Sacred Hunger covers a period between 1752 and 1765... it concerns the entangled and conflicting fortunes of two cousing: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a Lancashire merchant, and Matthew Paris, a scholar and surgeon just released from prison for 'denying Holy Writ'... the Liverpool Merchant is the vessel on which the whole of the novel hinges, and it carries the reader deep into the history of man's iniquitous greed... As regards its dramatic breadth and energy, no recent domestic novel has come within a mile of it.
-- Anthony Quinn in the Independent

Winner of the 1992 Booker Prize.