Sacred Hunger

Sacred Hunger is a historical novel by the British writer Barry Unsworth, published in 1992. It shared the Booker Prize that year with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient.

The book begins in England during the Enlightenment and centres on the Liverpool Merchant, a slave ship employed in the triangular trade that formed the backbone of the Atlantic slave trade. Its two main characters are cousins: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a rich Lancashire merchant, and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who goes on the voyage.

The novel's organising subject is greed, and the slave trade is the ground on which it works that question out. Unsworth uses a very large cast, some of whom appear in a single scene and some of whom are followed throughout the book, and he mixes appalling cruelty with long comic passages in the language of the period. He returned to the same territory many years later in a sequel, The Quality of Mercy, which was published in 2011 and was his last book.