The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew''s dreamlike jungle voyage ...
''My new all time favourite book ... A magnificent, breathtaking and terrifying novel.'' Tsitsi Dangarembga
''An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.'' Jamaica Kincaid
''A masterpiece: I love this book for its language, adventure and wisdoms.’ Monique Roffey
''Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris’s work.'' Jeet Thayil
''The Guyanese William Blake … Such poetic intensity.'' Angela Carter
I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...
A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock ...
A modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris'' masterpiece has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers.
''One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.’ Guardian
''Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.'' Observer
''Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.'' The Times
''The most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.'' Fred D''Aguiar
''Extraordinary ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.'' Pauline Melville
