English Passengers

BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST

“A robust intellectual entertainment: a comic sea adventure, survival tale and quest for the Garden of Eden all bound in one.” —The Globe and Mail

In 1857 when Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of rum smugglers from the Isle of Man are detained by London Customs, they are given a huge fine they cannot afford and are forced to put their ship Sincerity up for charter. The only takers are two eccentric Englishmen headed for the island of Tasmania: The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, who believes the Garden of Eden was located there, and Dr. Thomas Potter, who is developing a sinister thesis about the races of men. And these passengers are only slightly odder than the crew, a diverse and lively bunch better equipped to entertain one another than to steer Sincerity around Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean. Yet they set sail, bound for a thrilling, epic romp across the high seas and cultures of the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile in Tasmania, an aborigine named Peevay recounts his people’s struggles against the invading British, who prove as lethal in their good intentions as in their cruelty. As the English passengers approach Peevay’s land, their bizarre notions ever more painfully at odds with reality, we know a mighty collision is looming.