Slightly strained

An escaped convict who took part in a slave-ship mutiny and a Liverpudlian banker hungry for land in a north-eastern pit village are the main characters of this novel set in 1767, which is a sequel to Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth’s excellent, Booker-sharing yarn about the slave trade (it and The English Patient won in 1992). The convict, Sullivan, is an Irish fiddler who slips out of Newgate and makes for Durham, where he hopes to find the family of Billy Blair, a dead shipmate and fellow mutineer. In the earlier book, Sullivan and Blair rose up against their captain as, en route to the Caribbean, he prepared to toss overboard sick slaves who would fetch more in insurance than on sale. The rebels and their African captives wound up in the Florida jungle, where they lived for 12 years as equals (ish), to the chagrin of Kemp — the banker whose suicidally debt-ridden father funded the voyage.