A High Wind in Jamaica

Set in the years after Emancipation, Richard Hughes’s novel follows the Bas-Thornton children, sent home to England after a hurricane flattens their crumbling Jamaican estate. When pirates capture their ship, the youngsters slip almost unnoticed into life aboard the outlaw vessel, and the adults around them badly misread what children are actually capable of feeling and doing. Hughes writes childhood as a strange, self-contained world, closer to the amoral than the innocent, and the collision between the pirates’ rough kindness and the children’s cool detachment builds toward genuine unease. Sharp, funny, and quietly disturbing, it reshaped the way fiction imagines the inner life of the young. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.