At first the pirates are the brutal ones, drinking heavily and throwing people overboard as pirates will. Here's where it gets good, because the pirates and the children begin to switch places. Later on, as the ship is returning to Europe, we enter Treasure Island territory when the vessel is boarded by pirates. The story begins almost whimsically in Jamaica, with five English children surviving a hurricane. But that's completely wrong its theme is actually how heartless children are. To say A High Wind in Jamaica is a novel about children who are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children's book. I took the book with me to the Yaddo Artist Colony in upstate New York, where I was at work on a new novel, and one snowy day I read the whole thing in one gulp. Then a close friend, the writer Daniel Handler, handed me Richard Hughes' 1929 novel A High Wind in Jamaica, which had recently (and beautifully) been republished by The New York Review of Books. Back then, reading great fiction never felt like work - it was a very private kind of joy. Anything you hear to the contrary is a web of deceit.Ī few years ago, I was telling everyone I knew that I wished I could recapture the feeling about literature I had when I was young. He lives in San Francisco a few houses down from his identical twin brother, who often takes advantage of their resemblance in order to commit diamond heists and pin them on Andrew. Andrew Sean Greer is the author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, among other works of fiction.

High Wind in Brittany by Caroline Gayet