Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris
In his tale of a doomed crew beating their way up-river through the jungles of Guyana, first published in 1960, Wilson Harris revealed the unique poetic vision and laid out the themes and designs, not only of his famous work, The Guyana Quartet, but of all his future work. The Palace of the Peacock displays that vision in all its hallucinatory vividness, given additional impact by its rejection of the conventions of the twentieth-century novel and the uncompromising energy of its use of language in its response to character and landscape. The compelling adventure story of the narrative is paralleled by the artistic adventure of its composition.
Wilson Harris was born in 1921 in the former colony of British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before leaving for England in 1959 to become a full-time writer. His exploration of the dense forests, rivers and vast savannahs of the Guyanese hinterland features prominently in the settings of his fiction. Harris's novels are complex, alluding to diverse mythologies from different cultures, and eschew conventional narration in favour of shifting interwoven voices. His first novel Palace of the Peacock (1960) became the first of The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963). He later wrote The Carnival Trilogy (Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990)). His most recent novels are Jonestown (1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of a thousand followers of cult leader Jim Jones; The Dark Jester (2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and one of his most accessible novels in decades, The Ghost of Memory (2006). Wilson Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liege (2001). He has twice been winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780571193233 |
| ISBN 10 | 0571193234 |
| Title | Palace of the Peacock |
| Author | Wilson Harris |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber |
| Year published | 1998-04-20 |
| Number of pages | 128 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |